Explore "United Fruit Co" by Pablo Neruda on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
When the trumpet blared everything on earth was prepared and Jehovah distributed the world to Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other entities:
United Fruit Inc. reserved for itself the juiciest, the central seaboard of my land,
America's sweet waist.
It rebaptized its lands the "Banana Republics," and upon the slumbering corpses, upon the restless heroes who conquered renown, freedom, and flags, it established the comic opera: it alienated self-destiny, regaled Caesar's crowns, unsheathed envy, drew the dictatorship of flies:
Trujillo flies, Tacho flies,
Carias flies, Martínez flies,
Ubico flies, flies soaked in humble blood and jam, drunk flies that drone over the common graves, circus flies, clever flies versed in tyranny.
Among the bloodthirsty flies the Fruit Co. disembarks, ravaging coffee and fruits for its ships that spirit away our submerged lands' treasures like serving trays.
Meanwhile, in the seaports' sugary abysses,
Indians collapsed, buried in the morning mist: a body rolls down, a nameless thing, a fallen number, a bunch of lifeless fruit dumped in the rubbish heap.