Banana Republics of Chocolate
I was born in Honduras, a country where roads have always carried the other one—NGO trucks, foreign buyers, government officials—and now, was my turn. As a child, I’d pause in the dust, watching white trucks go by, wondering who they were and why we always stood still while they passed.
In the 1940s—an era when the winds of modernity swept through the tropics, and Honduras, like many young nations, stood at the threshold of global trade, reshaping its land and labor for export. Banana Republics were formed. As our story writes our history. My Fathers Mother a tall, striking woman from a village with Jewish and Indigenous roots, found work on the plantations and His father, an Afro-Caribbean man from Belize who fought in World War II, arrived with the promise of land through a railroad project that was never completed—except for the parts that moved bananas.
My father was born in the lush banana fields, among wooden houses perched on four-foot stilts—at a time when foreign companies carved railways through jungles, routines through families, all greased by bribes flowing through politicians and courtrooms.
Some say it was exploitation. Others call it progress. In our family, that duality has always lived at the kitchen table.
Where my aunt laments the company's minimal offerings, my father argues that the northern part of the country benefited from the industry and progress brought by American companies. Their contrasting views on the same story left me pondering the complexity of truth. My aunt wept as she recalled tractors demolishing their homes, accusing the companies of destroying everything, including the cemetery, with no respect. My father, acknowledging her pain, remembers being sent by the military to assist in the eviction of families for an American company's project, carrying out his duties as a young Capitan with a heavy heart. He mentions that he personally ensured the elderly ladies, who were reluctant to leave, were moved gently, while explain to them in the familiar voice that he learned from them the necessity of abandoning their lifelong homes. "They all knew me," said my dad, "they raised me. All those little old ladies were nothing but kind to me, that's why I made sure they were not manhandled in the move." And just like that, a harsh political truth can become a kind personal tale.
My aunt remembers labor with no rest, lost wages, and homes demolished without warning. My father recalls order, opportunity, and duty. Both memories shaped me.
Years later, I returned to those fields—not just to visit, but to source Cacao. The banana fields are now cacao farms. The long white houses where my family once tallied wages, packed fruit, and waited for pay are now fermentation rooms, drying patios, and guesthouses for chocolate buyers. I once taught a chocolate-making workshop in the same corridor where my aunt once sorted bananas for export.
And yes—now I’m the one in the white truck.
Hondurans are either blessed or burdened with two enduring gifts: a long memory and a disarming smile. The smile softens hard truths, but the memory never lets you escape them.
During a farm visit, I shared with the now farm director that my family had once worked these same lands—lands where the past is still very much present, etched into every conversation, every glance. He smiled in return and praised the pristine condition of the area, untouched by drug trafficking or violence, crediting the presence of the government and foreign NGOs. “If the land were left to the locals,” he added gently, “it might be covered in coca fields.”
Anyone on the other side of that fence might say otherwise—that if people had land of their own, they’d have something to live for, not something to fight over.
We continued walking, exchanging courteous smiles and veiled reminders of stories told to make the other feel the weight of what we have not forgotten, we ended up at the headwaters of one of the country's main rivers—surrounded by the calm and peace only a mother can give.
He praised, in a botanical and technical language pruned and fertilized by Western education, how thousands of animals and plants rely on the health of these headwaters.
“The land doesn't concern itself with politics,” he said. “It's about life. Ultimately, it's not about who owns the land, but about keeping this mountain sacred.”
To which I also smiled, and concurred.
As we marveled at the peaceful majesty of the headwaters, I understood that their unspoiled beauty was not the result of foreign intervention or domestic isolation, but of a delicate presence that with silk laces of wonder would rope us all to her arms.
And that, similar to the elderly ladies who were dispossessed of their land and led away by soldiers like my father, the matter wasn't about us protecting them or the land from perceived oppressors—it was about them protecting us from our own tendencies to own and to be right.
Whether we call them Banana Republics or Cacao Farms, whether we argue stewardship or ownership, foreign or domestic control—perhaps our human disagreements are only a distraction, when she moves, mend, and rest as we bickered.