The Fish That Ate the Whale

Cohen tells the story of Samuel Zemurray, a Russian Jewish immigrant who arrived in Alabama with nothing, started by buying ripes, meaning bananas too close to spoiling for the major importers to ship, and built a business that eventually took over United Fruit, the company that had spent decades trying to destroy him.

The early business is a study in finding value that larger competitors discard. Zemurray bought ripes at low prices, arranged with railroads to sell them along the route before they spoiled, and telegraphed ahead to grocers to have buyers waiting. The margins came from speed and from information that his size allowed him to act on.

He then bought land in Honduras, and when the Honduran government's debt arrangement with American banks threatened his position, he financed a coup, hiring mercenaries and installing a former president. Cohen documents this directly, including the role of the American government and the origin of the term banana republic. The takeover of United Fruit is the book's set piece. Zemurray sold his company to United Fruit for stock, watched the share price collapse under poor management, quietly accumulated proxies from other shareholders, and took control of the board in a single meeting.

Cohen writes admiringly and the tone romanticises Zemurray. The book covers the 1954 Guatemalan coup, in which United Fruit's interests and the CIA's intervention overlapped, but treats it with less weight than its consequences deserve. The labour conditions on the plantations receive limited attention. The material on operating advantages against a larger competitor is genuinely instructive, and the political history should be read alongside other sources.