The Banana Wars

The United States Marine Corps once fought for God, country, and bananas.

This book is about the Banana Wars that lasted from the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 until Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy of 1934. When you read this story, you'll learn how and why the US Marines invaded Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Cuba, Haiti, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. You'll also learn how the US Marines occupied and ruled Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic for years.

You'll read about why bananas became such an important commodity and how a combination of technologies made it possible. And you'll learn how the American public was persuaded to start buying all those bananas. You'll see how the United Fruit Company put all the pieces together to form an incredibly efficient company powerful enough to overturn presidents and dictators.

You'll find out how gaining possession of California inevitably led the United States to see the Caribbean and Central America as vital to American national security.

You'll learn that an episode in a world-famous novel by the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez is true.

You'll discover the story of the battleship USS Oregon circumnavigating South America in a 12,000-mile, sixty-day voyage to join the Atlantic fleet as the Spanish-American War broke out-and how the epic journey played into the design of the Panama Canal.

You'll read about a 1903 crisis that led to German, British, and Italian warships blockading Venezuela and to Teddy Roosevelt amending the Monroe Doctrine.

When you read this book, you'll also discover the following:

• An amendment by a US Senator to an obscure piece of legislation controlled the destiny of Cuba for a generation.
• The kind of banana all this was about has gone extinct.
• The Germans planned to conquer an island near Puerto Rico and use it to attack the United States.
• A US Marine major general wrote a book about being a gangster for capitalism.
• The owner of a banana corporation kept mercenary soldiers like Machine Gun Molony on the payroll in case he needed to overturn an uncooperative government.
• An insulted US Navy admiral almost started a war with Mexico.
• A defeated Mexican dictator conspired with German spies to keep the United States out of World War 1.