I had stopped at the shabby old store-and-warf across the
river from where we are staying to talk with our canvas shop about material
choices. The canvas guys are located behind the store, so we use the store warf
to tie up the dinghy when we go to talk with them. The store has a faded
painted sign saying “Tienda Reed” but everyone calls it “Chiqui’s”. The store has been here since the dawn of time
and was the original-and-only source of supplies on the river back in the day. Nowadays it sits in the shadow and truck noise
of the new 100ft-high concrete bridge that crosses the river here. It was hot,
so I grabbed a real Coke (in glass, with real sugar; the kind of authentically
nice food product that is common outside the US) from the cooler, paid my 3.5Q,
and went around to meet with the canvas guys.
It was a quick chat, took me only two minutes to decide on the material
for our next project, so I still had a lot of the Coke left as I wandered back
through the old store on my way back to the dinghy. I was wandering the store working on my Coke,
looking through their assortment of hardware (the kind of things that are
utterly critical to keeping a house and boat going here in the mangroves and
you just never know when you will run across that one bit that you didn’t know
you needed) when an older river gent (no other word for his appearance) sitting
on the store bench chuckled and said something about my Coke being very
refreshing. [Note – from here forward
this was all in Spanish so I probably have some of the facts wrong] I replied
with yes, Coke was the best of all drinks.
Which he also laughed at and asked if I knew why it was so popular in
the Rio. I drifted over to his bench
saying “no, I didn’t”, and sat down as he started to tell me the story in the
way of old men who know people and the world.
It turns out that there was nothing at what is now the
bustling port of Puerto Barrios, just forest and water. The United Fruit Company, now basically
Chiquita, wanted to build up the port because the existing port at Livingston
was essentially inaccessible to rail. So
they brought in large numbers of workers, housed them at Livingston, and
ferried them to Puerto Barrios daily.
With the food tax situation, where there were large sales taxes on food,
United Fruit was paying their people with food since they had an “in” with the government
that allowed them to not pay the tax. They also were importing Cokes from the
US, which was so popular that the workers would wait for hours for the boat
that brought it to Livingston. With the
supply of food and Cokes, United Fruit had a locked-in workforce. I pointed out
that Cokes of the day were loaded with cocaine instead of today’s caffeine, making
them that much more popular, which he smiled and nodded at, saying that was
exactly the point. We then talked at
length about the days following United Fruit, the end of the dictator era with
the passing of Jorge Ubico in the 1944 revolution (we had arrived on the
federal holiday of Revolution Day and there was a huge celebration going on all
weekend), the communist/leftist guerilla wars, it was a bad time for everyone, how
Cuba is still stuck there eating their idealisms, .. .
We got to a break in the chat and I asked him his name. He said
something complicated that I didn’t quite catch, but that everyone just called
him Chiqui.
Royce Johnson
OCT 2018
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