We arrived at the capital city, Castries, with its bad traffic and worse roads. We parked and walked toward the town square, littered and unkempt. There was nothing happening here but a handful of vagrants sleeping under the trees. The center of town is a park with a giant Samaan tree, 400 years old and dedicated to Derek Walcott, the poet-playwright who constantly reminded St. Lucians that there was more to their island than coddling tourists.
This is the city port city where most of the bananas leave St. Lucia. Today, United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit are called Chiquita and Del Monte. Their actions, and these bananas, still create battles between the empires in the Caribbean. Although in a modern way. St. Lucia became one of the major banana producers for Britain. Britain did so, partly to encourage democracy, partly to help their old former colonies. The exports proved an amazing economic gain. In these islands, fruit export accounts for up to sixty percent of the economy. Britain, along with other European economies, gave preferential treatment to their colonial banana friends. But as the 1990's came about, and Europe slid toward reunification, the specifics of free trade rolled onto the world stage.
The United States reckoned all of this to be protectionism. Which it was - St. Lucia was propping its prices, and Europe, so familiar with that practice, obliged.
And taste in bananas was changing, too. People wanted their bananas like they wanted their coffee and burgers - they wanted uniform, perfect, industrial cloned super bananas. They wanted Starbucks bananas. This would make things hard on the five-acre Eastern Caribbean farmers, who watched over every bunch, bruised and greenish-brown though they may be.
Only the American-run banana producers could pull off the perfect banana, in their giant Chiquita and Del Monte facilities in Latin America, run by men in expensive suits. As the 1990's neared an end, the banana plantations in St. Lucia also appeared to be near their end. The logical crop alternative became marijuana.
But to stay legitimate, St. Lucia had to fight for the banana, and that meant industrialization. Starbucks bananas for Britain. By 1999, the United States claimed it won a giant battle with Europe. The World Trade Organization ruled that Europe's import restrictions were illegal. If Europe does not abide, America has the right to fight back with trade restrictions on European luxury goods. Bananas for crocodile-skin boots.
And that's how it ended. A small industry being replaced by drugs, a nation bent on supplanting bananas with tourism. More cruise tourists littering the island with their impatient need to relax.
A man and woman with their child were walking through the square. They didn't see us, and the man lifted his child into the air over the fence protecting Derek Walcott's giant Samaan tree. The child took a leak on the tree. And this is when I asked, if the victor writes the history, who wrote the history of these islands in the Caribbean?
Everybody has that desire to see small countries write their own history. Like that schoolteacher, Emerald, saying, "I treat my students like my children." But these countries - still being pulled and tugged by the Empires, it is good to know that in the end, maybe the plants had more of a role than outside forces. The French are gone, the British have lost their colonies, the Spanish are banished. The Caribs are all but vanquished. St. Lucia is independent now, but up until now, its history was decided by a simple botanical process of evolution - desires created in the form of sugarcane, bananas and marijuana.
We continued to wander and came upon a back alley. Looking up, we saw plants making hold on the aluminum siding panels, spilling green onto the gray.
