1947, September: (The Destruction of the Banana Industry: Standard Fruit Nationalized, Seven Concessions to Seven Friends, and the Ships Without Refrigeratio…

1947, September: (The Destruction of the Banana Industry: Standard Fruit Nationalized, Seven Concessions to Seven Friends, and the Ships Without Refrigeration): Under the 1935 Standard Fruit contract, Haiti’s fine little bananas had risen to an export of 7.3 million stems and the second largest income earner in the economy. Standard Fruit ships plied Haitian ports while the company spent money for wharves, buoys, roads, and even schools. It was too tempting. In September 1947, refusing to renew Standard Fruit’s monopoly, Estimé nationalized the industry, parceling it out into seven concessions to seven political friends, including Colonel Magloire. What followed was one of the saddest stories in Haiti’s economic history. The concessionaires cut prices paid to peasants, thus increasing profits but discouraging production; worse still, the government-hired shipping that replaced Standard’s vessels turned out to lack refrigeration, so cargoes arrived spoiled and stinking. Both production and exports collapsed in 1948 and ceased entirely thereafter. As Père Roger Riou of La Tortue lamented, Estimé wreaked the worst possible harm to his country: the Americans had proper refrigerator ships and outlets, while the Haitians had no ships and chartered Greek and Panamanian vessels without refrigeration, and in a few months the whole business was finished. Estimé’s apologists said greed and antiforeignism were not his motives. His reforms demanded money and the new men in power were in a hurry. It was a defense that, read through the decolonial lens, revealed the fundamental predicament of the postcolonial state: the imperative to fund national development colliding with the absence of national capital, producing a nationalization that destroyed the productive capacity it sought to capture, the sovereign act of economic self-determination becoming the instrument of economic self-destruction because the structural conditions of dependency (the lack of refrigerated shipping, of export networks, of working capital) remained intact beneath the transfer of ownership.