Pablo Neruda's Birthday

July 12 -- today is Pablo Neruda's 103rd birthday. Here's a poem by the People's Poet about the United Fruit Company's pillaging of Latin America. United Fruit was renamed Chiquita Brands in the 1980s. Different name, same company, same blood-sucking vampire. Check out the recent news about Chiquita's funding of right-wing death squads in Colombia, guilty of murdering, raping, and torturing thousands of people.

Neruda the People's Poet was also Neruda the Poet of Love and Neruda the Poet of Common Things. Many of those works ought to be read today as well. But, as Brecht lamented, "Ah, what an age it is / When to speak of trees is almost a crime / For it is a kind of silence about injustice!"

The United Fruit Co. (1950)
By Pablo Neruda

When the trumpet sounded, it was
all prepared on the earth,
and Jehovah parceled out the earth
to Coca-Cola, Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other entities:
The Fruit Company, Inc.
reserved for itself the most succulent,
the central coast of my own land,
the delicate waist of America.
It rechristened its territories
as the “Banana Republics”
and over the sleeping dead,
over the restless heroes
who brought about the greatness,
the liberty and the flags,
it established the comic opera:
abolished the independencies,
presented crowns of Caesar,
unsheathed envy, attracted
the dictatorship of the flies,
Trujillo flies, Tacho flies,
Carias flies, Martinez flies,
Ubico flies, damp flies
of modest blood and marmalade,
drunken flies who zoom
over the ordinary graves,
circus flies, wise flies
well trained in tyranny.

Among the bloodthirsty flies
the Fruit Company lands its ships,
taking off the coffee and the fruit;
the treasure of our submerged
territories flows as though
on plates into the ships.

Meanwhile Indians are falling
into the sugared chasms
of the harbors, wrapped
for burial in the mist of the dawn:
a body rolls, a thing
that has no name, a fallen cipher,
a cluster of dead fruit
thrown down on the dump.