United Fruit Co. by Pablo Neruda

When the trumpet sounded

everything was prepared on earth,

and Jehovah gave the world

to Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,

Ford Motors, and other corporations.

The United Fruit Company

reserved for itself the most juicy

piece, the central coast of my world,

the delicate waist of America.

It rebaptized these countries

Banana Republics,

and over the sleeping dead,

over the unquiet heroes

who won greatness,

liberty, and banners,

it established an opera buffa:

it abolished free will,

gave out imperial crowns,

encouraged envy, attracted

the dictatorship of flies:

Trujillo flies, Tachos flies

Carias flies, Martinez flies,

Ubico flies, flies sticky with

submissive blood and marmalade,

drunken flies that buzz over

the tombs of the people,

circus flies, wise flies

expert at tyranny.

With the bloodthirsty flies

came the Fruit Company,

amassed coffee and fruit

in ships which put to sea like

overloaded trays with the treasures

from our sunken lands.

Meanwhile the Indians fall

into the sugared depths of the

harbors and are buried in the

morning mists;

a corpse rolls, a thing without

name, a discarded number,

a bunch of rotten fruit

thrown on the garbage heap.

         This is under the Marxism theory because it revealed social struggle specifically the struggle of the workers to get equal and humane treatment from their employer. The repetition of the different names of corporation denotes the existing the suppression of rights of the workers in our society and the lack of opportunity to be heard because these corporation increasing became more powerful. There are also existing unequal distributions of wealth in the society that leads for those in the upper class abused the lower class. If we try to scrutinize its meaning the poem is about the native people (the workers) who have lost their land because of these greedy large corporations. They have lost their right to work in their own land with humane treatment. Thus this poem is a revolution to the “corporation invaders”.

             

              This poem is one of those poems which intended to seek for equality among men.