Costa Rica (Lonely Planet, 9th Edition) - Matthew Firestone [16]
The Costa Rican coffee boom was on. The drink’s quick fix made it popular among working-class consumers in the industrializing north. The aroma of riches lured a wave of enterprising German immigrants to Costa Rica, enhancing the technical and financial skills in the business sector. By century’s end, more than one-third of the Central Valley was dedicated to coffee cultivation, and coffee accounted for more than 90% of all exports and 80% of foreign-currency earnings.
The coffee industry in Costa Rica developed differently from the rest of Central America. As elsewhere, there arose a group of coffee barons, elites that reaped the rewards for the export bonanza. But Costa Rican coffee barons lacked the land and labor to cultivate the crop. Coffee production is labor-intensive, with a long and painstaking harvest season. The small farmers became the principal planters. The coffee barons, instead, monopolized processing, marketing and financing. The coffee economy in Costa Rica created a wide network of high-end traders and small-scale growers, whereas in the rest of Central America, a narrow elite controlled large estates, worked by tenant laborers.
In the 1940s children in Costa Rica learned to read with a text that stated ‘Coffee is good for me. I drink coffee every morning.’
Coffee wealth became a power resource in politics. Costa Rica’s traditional aristocratic families were at the forefront of the enterprise. At midcentury, three-quarters of the coffee barons were descended from just two colonial families. The country’s leading coffee exporter at this time was President Juan Rafael Mora Porras (1849–59), whose lineage went back to the colony’s founder Juan Vásquez de Coronado. Mora was overthrown by his brother-in-law, after the president proposed to form a national bank independent from the coffee barons. The economic interests of the coffee elite would thereafter become a priority in Costa Rican politics.
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BANANA EMPIRE
The coffee trade unintentionally gave rise to Costa Rica’s next export boom – bananas. Getting coffee out to world markets necessitated a rail link from the central highlands to the coast, and Limón’s deep harbor made an ideal port. Inland was dense jungle and insect-infested swamps, which prompted the government to contract the task to Minor Keith, nephew of an American railroad tycoon.
The project was a disaster. Malaria and accidents churned through workers as Tico recruits gave way to US convicts and Chinese indentured servants, who were in turn replaced by freed Jamaican slaves. To entice Keith to continue, the government turned over 3200 sq km of land along the route and provided a 99-year lease to run the railroad. In 1890, the line was finally completed and running at a loss.
Keith had begun to grow banana plants along the tracks as a cheap food source for the workers. Desperate to recoup his investment, he shipped some bananas to New Orleans in the hope of starting a side venture. He struck gold, or rather yellow. Consumers went crazy for the elongated finger fruit. By the early 20th century, bananas surpassed coffee as Costa Rica’s most lucrative export and the country became the world’s leading banana exporter. Unlike in the coffee industry, the profits were exported along with the bananas.
Costa Rica was transformed by the rise of Keith’s banana empire. He joined with another American importer to found the infamous United Fruit Company, soon the largest employer in Central America. To