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"Bitter Fruit" is a comprehensive and insightful account of the CIA operation to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954. First published in 1982, this book has become a classic, a textbook case of the relationship between the United States and the Third World. The authors make extensive use of U.S. government documents and interviews with former CIA and other officials. It is a warning of what happens when the United States abuses its power.

Ecuadorianists have long awaited a book on the country's banana industry, and Steve Striffler has made an excellent beginning with this prize-winning research on the United Fruit (UF) company's Tenguel estate. He wanted his study of the workers' struggle for better wages and land to go beyond previous works that tended to focus on leading capitalistic actors. Casting his work in Marxian terms, Striffler finds that worker power—at Tenguel, at other banana producing regions in Ecuador, and across Latin America—played a decisive role in undermining foreign-owned enclaves. Striffler argues that "class struggle" best explains the emergence of the "contract farming" system that transformed agrarian landscapes. Although Ecuadorian worker efforts did not ultimately improve their lives, Striffler finds that struggles at least provided a base for subsequent popular organizations.

In a 1929 issue of Unifruitco, the monthly employee magazine of the United Fruit Company (UFCo), an essay contest was announced asking employees to write what in their opinion was the most valuable/important topic in a recently published book detailing the company's wide range of activities in the tropics. The two winning essays, published in a subsequent issue, both argued that sanitation and tropical medicine were the most important aspects of the great transnational company's operations. One of the prize-winners, a Mr. R.E. McDermott, the Scranton Branch Manager for the Fruit Dispatch Company, asserted that sanitation was nothing less than the key to the United Fruit Company's "advancement of civilization in the American Tropics."[1] The United Fruit Company Medical Department's healthcare and sanitation initiatives, along with the civilizing ideology that stood behind them, are concrete manifestations of UFCo's more general cultural agenda in Central America. The role of medicine and sanitation in bringing civilization to the tropics was a recurring theme in works published by the United Fruit Company throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Company doctors identified themselves as agents of science and rational modernity and believed that their mission was not simply to cure the body but also the mind and, by extension, society. Beyond improved healthcare, the Medical Department understood its work as an integral part of the Company's mission of infusing its laborers in Central America with a capitalist American work ethic and making them productive and efficient laborers.

In the late nineteenth century, migrants from Jamaica, Colombia, Barbados, and beyond poured into Caribbean Central America, building railroads, digging canals, selling meals, and farming homesteads. On the rain-forested shores of Costa Rica, U.S. entrepreneurs and others established vast banana plantations. Over the next half-century, short-lived export booms drew tens of thousands of migrants to the region. In Port Limon, birthplace of the United Fruit Company, a single building might house a Russian seamstress, a Martinican madam, a Cuban doctor, and a Chinese barkeep--together with stevedo