Sam the Banana Man: Gunboats, Coups, and United Fruit

In the late 1800s, a Russian immigrant named Samuel Zemurray spent nearly everything he had on a load of bananas, and turned it into a fortune. But Sam the Banana Man wasn’t just a business titan. He was a puppeteer on the geopolitical stage, bankrolling a revolution in Honduras and pushing the CIA to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected leader.

For decades, Zemurray battled the United Fruit Company, an institution with its tentacles in governments across the Americas — including the United States. In the end, he wound up running the company.

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