Bananas

            When I spoke to my tica family about bananas and plantains in Costa Rica, Their answers were not all that surprising. Bananas are put into milkshakes, juices, fruit salad, banana cake, and eaten fresh. As far as plantains, platano maduro are fried, put in soup, or cooked with cheese, honey, and canela. Platano verde are used to either make patacones or picadillo de platano. Because there are so many uses for bananas, and that they are so abundant, my tica brother states that they are a important in Costa Rica especially since they were a top export with coffee in the past. 

            Though bananas were a high exporter, and still are today, my tica brother made sure to state that the cultivation of bananas is not as important as the cultivation of coffee. While this could stem from statistics of exports in the past, I believe part of it also stems from the national mythology of coffee being a more “tican” crop. Mentioned in Mitchel and Pentzer’s, “Costa Rica: A Global Studies Handbook,” we saw that coffee workers were favored in the government. He states, “But unlike coffee workers’ wages, banana workers’ wages did not have much of an effect on the national economy.” The quote is an example of how the coffee workers were more valued and included in society, while banana workers were exiled on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica.

            Though the banana workers may not have been valued, the bananas had value both in Costa Rica and the rest of the world. Bananas were an entry into the world market. In fact, Costa Rica became so well known for bananas that in 1990, when Costa Rica qualified for the world cup for the first time in history, they were known in the U.S. as the República de Bananera. Clearly bananas had become central in the U.S. and affected our perception of Costa Rica.

            Also in the history of Costa Rica, the train was important to the cultivation of bananas, especially Minor Keith’s deal of constructing a train as long as he was tax-free for 99 years and could have banana plantations next to the train. While this was not fair for the workers, the train stimulated Costa Rican economy for almost 100 years before it was shut down due to earthquake damage. My tica brother stated that the “old idiot” suspended the use of the railway, a stupid move in his opinion. He did add that luckily, in the past 5 or 6 years, the government has been trying to improve the railway for use in the future. It has been used for tourist reasons since 2008.

            As far as my pictures go, my wonderful computer has decided that it does not want to read my memory card. I would have shown a picture of the bananas in Nicaragua, and a picture of the bananas sold here on the street. In Granada, I did not see many fruit street stands, and the one that I did take a picture of was a small cart with many fruits and only a small section for bananas. Here we have one street stand that we go to the most and we are friends with the vendors. They always have plenty of bananas. There are the small miniature ones, the normal sized bananas, platanos maduros, and platanos verdes. The whole front of the truck is dedicated to plantains and bananas of all sorts. I would have to observe more Costa Rican fruit stands, but from the ones I have seen, bananas have a prominent place in sales. One thing I would have liked to do is go to a market in Nicaragua, so I could compare the market in Costa Rica with the market in Nicaragua.