Banana Man, Peeling and Revealing: Life in the Tropics, #2

By Clyde S. Stephens

BANANA MAN, Peeling and Revealing, Life in the Tropics: Book 2 is a riveting narrative that traces the enduring legacy of banana pioneers. From the resilient second-generation 'banana kids,' who spent their formative years amidst the lush banana plantations and Company towns, to the harrowing tales of how two world wars left an indelible mark on many of their lives, this epic journey unveils a remarkable tapestry of history, resilience, and the enduring spirit of those who shaped a unique era. Embark on a tropical odyssey through the captivating landscapes of Panama, entwined with the fascinating history of the United Fruit Company. This narrative invites you to explore the intersection of cultures, economies, and nature and witness the dynamic tapestry of a region shaped by the whims of the Tropics and the influence of a formidable multinational corporation, in the heart of Panama.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cecropia Press
• Release date: Dec 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9789962715511

Book preview

Banana Man

Peeling and Revealing

Life in the Tropics

Book 2

Banana Man

Peeling and Revealing

Life in the Tropics

Book 2

By

Clyde S. Stephens

––––––––

Edited by

Dr. Ken Huff

Foreword by

Dr. Stanley Heckadon-Moreno

Copyright © 2023 by Clyde S. Stephens

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Book 1, ISBN: 9789962715504, eBook

Book 2, ISBN: 9789962715511, eBook

Book 3, ISBN: 9789962715528, eBook

Book 1, ISBN: 9789962715467, Soft Cover

Book 2, ISBN: 9789962715474, Soft Cover

Book 3, ISBN: 9789962715481, Soft Cover

1. PANAMA – HISTORY I. Title.

2. Bananas 3. United Fruit Company 4. Tropical America

5. Tropical History 6. Central America 7. Natural History

8. History 9. Germans

Cecropia Press

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Table of Contents

Foreword by Dr. Stanley Heckadon-Moreno

Map of Central America

1. Sea Level Canal Study

2. Science Versus Tradition

3. Canals in Bocas del Toro

4. Taming the San San River

5. Hospital Point: A Lost Story of Medical History

6. With C. H. Ellis Through Central America and Panama 1906,

by Ed Loyd

7. Unforgettable Memories at Hospital Point

8. Natural Entertainment at Hospital Point

9. Tick and Spider Bites

10. Black Physicians in early 20th Century Bocas del Toro,

by Ariel Rene Perez Price

11. A Boy from Bocas,

by Luis Ibu Alvarado

12. From Italy to the Western Hemisphere,

by Paul Messina

13. Sharks,

by John Munch, Dr. Erin Dillon and Clyde Stephens

14. Peace Corps Volunteers, Bocas del Toro,

by Joe Looby

15. Family Planning and the Wart

16. Reservations, Please

17. Bluefields — Panama: Going Back in Time

18. Striking it Rich at an Oil Well

19. The Zipper and La Solucion

20. Earthquake on Earth Day

The Author

About this Book

Acknowledgments

Books by Clyde S. Stephens

Thanks

Foreword

It is a pleasure and an honor to write this foreword for the most recent book by my friend Clyde Stephens. Very few have researched and published so much on the banana industry of Panama, Central America, northern South America, and the Caribbean. By training, he is an entomologist but given his many interests, he is like a man of the renaissance. Besides rescuing many unknown chapters of one of the most important agricultural industries in the Tropics of the New World, he gradually became keenly passionate about the natural history of these countries, their people, customs and beliefs. Although born in the United States, he is also a card-carrying Bocasman, residing half of the year in Bocas del Toro, on the rainy Caribbean side of the Isthmus of Panama, in a solar-powered house he built at Hospital Point in 1991. This is the spectacular site where the United Fruit Company built its first hospital in 1899. He lives the rest of the year in Tavares, Florida.

I must digress some decades ago when we first met and became friends. In 1980 I was a young anthropologist for Panama’s Ministry of Economic Policy and Planning and had just published my first bilingual book on the oral history of the life and times of don Carlos Reid, a Creole from Bocas del Toro. One day, a security guard at the Ministry called and said an American entomologist from the Chiriqui Land Company in Bocas del Toro wanted to see me. I told him to let him in. My office was at the back of the Palacio de las Garzas, the Palace of the Herons, Panama’s presidential palace, near the Parque de la Catedral, the heart of this old port city. In minutes, we became friends. He told me he had worked in Puerto Armuelles where I was born and we had many friends in common. Clyde told me about his banana work in Central America with the United Fruit Company and about living and exploring in Bocas del Toro. However, he felt frustrated that there was hardly any information in Spanish about the notable history of the banana industry that had played such an important economic and social role in Bocas del Toro and Chiriqui. Schoolchildren and teachers hardly had any knowledge of the vital role of the banana industry in Panama. Since banana growing for export would soon be a century old in Bocas, he wanted to write a short monograph on this fascinating history and wondered if someone would publish his article in Spanish. He had hundreds of fascinating, but little-known photographs of the birth of the banana industry and its pioneers in Panama.

At the time, I was a member of Panama’s Anthropological Association and offered to translate and publish his manuscript in Spanish for Panamanian readers. Our members were delighted because many of them had done research in Bocas del Toro. In 1987, the booklet Bosquejo Histórico del Cultivo del Banano en la Provincia de Bocas del Toro (1880-1980) became the first special publication of the Revista Panameña de Antropología.

Soon, Clyde’s research and publications about the banana industry bloomed. He published Bananeros in Central America: True stories of the Tropics (1989). La historia de Punta Hospital, centro médico pionero 1899-1920 (1997). Banana People: True Stories of the Tropics (2002). Bosquejo Histórico de la Provincia de Bocas del Toro, Panama (2008). In these publications he rescues the visionary barons of the industry, the plantation managers, the engineers who built the railroads, the ports, and the towns. Then there were the mandadores responsible for the farms, the diverse peasantry who gradually became banana field workers in the modern agro-export industry. These workers included those who kept the rail lines, the farms or the muelleros who loaded the bananas ships. Also, there was the fascinating history of banana scientists and the doctors and nurses that staffed the hospitals; they were considered the best on the Caribbean side of Central America.

The banana industry also gave rise to a particular vocabulary, in Spanish and English, that Clyde handles masterfully. Geographically, his work takes place where bananas grow along the great tropical rivers with their rich alluvial soils, such as the Sixaola, Changuinola, Reventazon, Terraba, Ulua and the Motagua.

In Banana Man, his most recent publication, Clyde delights us with little known stories on the contributions of the United Fruit Company to the development of Central America, on the development of the manila hemp and rubber plantation industries during World War II, on the history of tropical medicine and on the building of banana canals. One chapter is devoted to living under a dictatorship.

One of the most interesting sections of his book is the role the Germans played in the development of the banana industry and the tragedies they suffered during the first and second world wars when their businesses were expropriated, and they were sent to concentration camps, and expatriated to Germany where many fell in the hands of the advancing Russian Red Army. Some managed to return, like the Probst family from Chiriqui.

Don Clyde, as people from Bocas call him, is a down-to-earth person, concerned about the welfare of others, who makes visitors feel good at his home, and is very hospitable. He is a great host, with a great sense of humor in English and Spanish, and who likes to poke fun at himself. His interests are wide and range from the economic and social history of regions to their natural history, the people and their customs and beliefs. He is also intellectually very generous, a researcher who likes to share his findings with others.

I am sure that Central Americans, Panamanians, and Colombians will find Clyde’s latest publication on the history of Chiquita bananas fascinating.

Stanley Heckadon-Moreno

Panama, March 2023

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1

Sea Level Canal Study

I was the banana research guy in the Changuinola banana plantations, and managers always asked me to take care of visiting scientists. One such person was Dr. James A. Duke of the Battelle Memorial Institute, a science and engineering organization. Later, he reciprocated with an invitation for me to collect and take notes on insects in Darien in eastern Panama, where extensive scientific studies were in progress. The studies were undertaken because the lock-based Panama Canal was being burdened by more and larger ships, and among the solutions whirling about was the idea of a sea-level waterway slicing through the tropical forests of eastern Panama.

Under one proposal, atomic energy would be used to blow up a mountain range that was in the proposed canal’s path. This was a staggering thought for most scientists and non-scientists alike. Yet it was scientists who were tasked to determine the probable ecological impact of such a massive undertaking.

Such was the situation in April 1966, when I flew from Changuinola in Bocas del Toro to Panama City and stayed overnight in James’s small, high-rise apartment. Early the next morning, he and I flew in a small, single-engine airplane to the wilds of Darien and landed on a short, grass airstrip somewhere near Santa Fe. From there, a native dugout, called a piragua, took us down the Sabana River to Boca Lara (now Puerto Lara), where a field camp was located.

I was assigned a bunk bed with a mosquito net in a huge open-air, palm-thatched bohio (hut) where about 30 members of a scientific team were lodged. Some had set up their microscopes and lab equipment either under the dry bohio or outside on makeshift tables in the sunlight—until the rains came. The scene was impressive and unforgettable; I was awed by the biodiversity and wild beauty. James introduced me to several renowned scientists, and this made me feel so humble, shaking their hands. Two of them were the famous Odum brothers: Dr. Eugene P. Odum, The father of modern ecology from the University of Georgia, and Dr. Howard T. Odum from the University of Florida. Other scientific titles at the site were mammalogist, ichthyologist, biologist, ornithologist, herpetologist, geologist, hydrologist, meteorologist, botanist—all the kinds of -ologists. In Boca Lara, I met Horace Loftin and Ed Tyson, who later assisted me with bat studies in the Changuinola banana plantations.

The manager who kept the camp going—a major task—was Jim Berlin. Jim had been my neighbor and close friend in Changuinola, where he had been the manager of a cattle company, the Ganadera Bocas, owned by Panamanian tycoon Mario Guardia. Don Mario replaced Jim with a son-in-law, Julio Alcedo, another close friend of mine. When Jim and his wife, Paula, moved to Panama City, they left their two daughters, Linda and Maureen, to live with Phyllis and me so the girls could finish the school year at the American School in Farm 8.¹ I told Jim the latest news about his daughters, and in return, he explained to me lots of things going on behind the scenes at the Boca Lara camp and about the mixture of native and foreign people there.

Indigenous Choco men wearing taparrabos (loincloths) walked around the camp with no pants. Some were hired to help with different chores at Boca Lara. Their piraguas were chartered to take scientists up and down the rivers. Choco women came to the camp grounds and caught the attention of new arrivals like me. They were painted, wore skirts, but had no upper garments, meaning that they were bare-breasted. It was even more novel that the women had brassieres slung over their shoulders. Christian missionaries had preached to them that it was not nice to go without brassieres. The women were not shy about this issue, and were laughing and giggling as they attempted to put on the contrivances. Most failed on their first attempts, but they were having fun. Some brassieres were strapped on upside down. It was all symbolic of how foreign do-gooders can mess up people’s lives and cultures.²

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Although James was a renowned botanist and ecologist, he mixed and related with the indigenous people like an anthropologist. As a result, he learned some of the Choco language and much about their lives. James pointed out a young girl reaching puberty. She had black face paint with certain designs, and this meant that she was ready for marriage. The black paint came from the fruit of Genipa americana and lasts about a week on the body. James illustrated this tree on the cover of his Darien Dictionary that compares and defines words in Choco, Guna, English and Spanish. I still have a copy of this book, plus other scientific publications on his work in Darien.

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James told me that the Choco people in the camp gave all the gringos a Choco nickname. Mine was Adíchichi, which means grasshopper—and was very appropriate. They had seen me collecting insects, which included a large, colorful grasshopper. I still have that original collection.

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After I returned home,³ I realized that the trip had taught me much about Darien and what science and scientists can do to make good decisions that affect the world. Gradually, as more experts began to come in, more and more questions were raised about the viability of a sea-level canal via atomic charges, said my good friend, Dr. Stanley Heckadon-Moreno, a highly respected Panamanian anthropologist. The sea-level proposal was rejected, but the decision could have gone the other way, with approval to blow up that vast wilderness. In the end, science, logic and common sense prevailed. I shudder to think of the other option.⁴

Notes: Sea Level Canal Study

1. Unfortunately, our house burned down in February 1966, because of a faulty old kerosene stove.

2. The Choco are now known as Emberá-Wounaan.

3. After several days at Boca Lara, a piragua took me down the river and across the bay to La Palma. Pacific tides that went up and down three and four meters left mud flats along the slummy shore of the town. This was a contrast for me, because I was accustomed to half meter tides at Bocas del Toro on the Caribbean side. Lodging overnight was in a minimal pensión. The next morning, I flew to Panama City in a small airplane, then continued on to the Changuinola banana plantations and landed at Base Line near our home.

4. Eventually, the existing canal was expanded with a third set of locks. The inauguration occurred on June 26, 2016.

2

Science versus Tradition

In the 1920s, the United Fruit Company sent Dr.s Vining C. Dunlap and Otto August Reinking of the research department to the Philippines, Indonesia and Southeast Asia to collect banana varieties. These banana collections were taken to Panama and kept in quarantine at Flat Rock on Columbus Island (Isla Colon) in Bocas del Toro. Later, the plants were moved to the mainland in Changuinola at Farm 6 for holding and studying.

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The two scientists probably never knew how important their collections would be a few years later. They had brought back multiple banana varieties like Valery that were resistant to Panama disease. Valery was