Truxillo Railroad Era Stories of Afro-Hondurans-Part III Merchants, Interethnic healing, etc.

Truxillo Railroad Era Stories of Afro-Hondurans-Part III

By Wendy Griffin Revised January 2013

Relationships with Truijillo and Tela Merchants and Other Stories During the Truxillo Railroad Period

The presence of the United Fruit Commissary in Puerto Castilla did not seem to ruin business for merchants in Trujillo or even for sales by the Garifuna women or Jews and Arabs. Boris Goldstien died recently at over 80 years old as one of the richest men in Honduras with investments in 28 companies, but the Garifunas of Tela still remember him arriving on his bicycle with cuts of cloth which he would leave with people and say I will come back next week or next month and you can pay me for it.   

The United Fruit butcher shop actually bought pigs from the Pech and the Ladinos of Olancho, and they slaughtered beef in Trujillo so they were probably buying cattle from local Ladino ranchers, too. A number of older Pech men like Don Amado and Don Carlos Duarte, and even some older Pech women like the grandmother of Juana Carolina Hernandez Torres reported going between Culmi in Olancho and Trujillo walking with pigs to sell. With the money from selling pigs, they would buy underwear and cloth, metal tools, big metal pots, used for cooking down sugar cane juice to make raw cane sugar (rapadura) and corn beer or chicha. 

The Glynn family prospered during the time of Truxillo railroad as they also brought in milk cows, and kept the city of Trujillo well supplied with milk. Yaya’s stories are full of references of passing the lecheros, the men who bring in the milk, of the Glynn family. The Glynn family ranch is located between the Garifuna communities of Trujillo and Santa Fe. The family got along well enough with the Garifunas that Johnny Glynn’s father Tomas Glynn accepted to have a Garifuna boy fostered with him and that is how Profesor Santos Angel Batiz was able to finish high school in Trujillo after graduating from the primary schools in Sangrelaya and Iriona.  Thomas Glynn remained fond of Prof. Batiz and left him land, a small house he stilllives in and two boats. Before Profesor Batiz lived with the Glynn family he lived with his sister and her Spanish husband so that he could go to primary school in Iriona.  Interethnic stories of fosterage were not rare among the older Garifunas I talked to, although they would be almost unthinkable now.

Doña Sasa’s Garifuna father was given in fosterage to a Ladino coronel in Balfate to raise, because that man, his godfather, had no children of his own. This may be the same coronel wheeling and dealing with passing banana boats for a good deal inArmenia in the novel “Barro” set about 1910. This coronel helped him study in La Ceiba, including going to Standard Fruit’s Fruit Inspector Training. After finishing the training he was sent with a personal recommendation of Vicente D’Antoni, the cousin of the founders of Standard Fruit the Vacarro Brothers and for whom the Standard Fruit’s hospital is named, to the Truxillo Railroads’s port in Puerto Castilla to be a Fruit Inspector, a post he held until the Company closed. Fruit inspectors were Jobs other historians have reported as reserved for White employees for the banana Companies. Racial división of work as well as racial división of banana towns and ports seemed to have been  the norm in US banana companies in Central America.

Julio Ariola was originally sent by his father from Santa Rosa de Aguan which had no elementary school then to Trujillo in the 1930’s when the Truxillo Railroad still existed to live with the Hasbun family, who were of Palestian Arab descent.  The family told the father they would help Julio Ariola go to school, but instead they worked him like a donkey for three years and never sent him to school. His father came and got him, and took him back to Santa Rosa de Aguan. Later he went to La Ceiba and was able to study and worked for Standard Fruit. A number of older Garifuna men reported working during the day in La Ceiba, usually for some part of Standard Fruit, and studying at night as the way they were able to finish high school.

I am not sure of how much the Garifunas worked in the actual banana camps.  Sebastian Marin said that the workers of the Truxillo from Trujillo to Tocoa and Saba were mostly “indios” (as the Garifunas call the mestizos), but that from Trujillo to Batalla and down past Sico into Olancho, the majority of the workers were Garifunas, Miskitos, and Black English speakers.  The Garifunas of Santa Fe, Guadelupe, and Trujillo remember the men going out to the camps in other parts of  Colon and Yoro for certain periods of time.

The Black man giving orders in a Standard Fruit banana camp in Yoro in Ramon Amaya Amador’s book Prision Verde set in the 1950’s seems to be a charactiture of a Garifuna supervisor as the workers observed that he spoke broken English, but he actually spoke good Spanish.  Bay Islander stories like Neff tell of their experiences of going to the North Coast to work when almost the only words they knew in Spanish were “Alto” (Stop), used by the pólice and the Army if they want to check your papers. 

Although Bay Islanders and North Black English speakers are often treated as two different groups, in my oral history research, the Bay Islanders also came to the North Coast to work, and North Coast Black English speakers sometimes married Black Bay Islander women andmoved to the Bay islands with them. Both Black and White English speakers who came to Honduras during the Truxillo Railroad period were also reported to have married women in the Mosquitia, for example the former Supervisor of Education in the Mosquitia Miguel Kelly’s father who was White and married a Miskito woman and the head of Miskito bilingual intercultural education Scott Wood’s grandfather and great uncle, the latter two originally Blacks from Chicago who married two dark skinned women from Rio Patuca in the Mosquitia.

I know one Ladino man Don Lencho who worked in Sico for the Truxillo when the Truxillo abandoned the area, and he moved down to Culmí, Olancho among the Pech and started a cattle ranch, a grapefruit farm, and at one point was mayor of Culmí. He had worked for various places for United Fruit, including Bocas de Toro Panama before settling in Culmi. Also the problematic Ladino community of Sico was founded by Ladinos who worked for the Truxillo in Sico in the 1930’s and remained there after the Railroad left, displacing a Pech community that was previously at Sico, so some Ladinos also worked in the branch of the railroad.

Canadian geographer Derek Parent reported that there was also a whole narrow gage railroad line from the Ibans Lagoon down the Rio Platano valley almost to Las Marias in the Mosquitia and then over to the east side of River Paulaya which apparently the Truxillo Railroad built illegally as their concessions were from Trujillo to Iriona to Juticalpa and Tegucigalpa.

Herman Alvarez, who grew up in San Juan, next to Tela, said that when the United Fruit Company started on the North Coast of Honduras, recruiters came to the Garifuna villages to recruit Garifunas, especially Garifuna men who had recently returned from working on the Panama Canal. Many  Garifunas were hesitant to work for the Company as they could not read or write, since there was no school in San Juan at that time. In 1913 when the Company started there were probably no schools in any Garifuna villages and no high schools on the North Coast, not even in San Pedro until around 1930.    (There was no public elementary school even in San Pedro until after the banana companies had arrived around 1917.  The elementary school in San Juan was started 51 years ago, which is part of the reason Herman Alvarez who is 61 had to walk 3 or 4 kilometers every day each way for 12 years to study at the bilingual school grades 1-9 and grades 10-12 in the Spanish language high school in Tela).  In comparison, there was reportedly a technical high school in Jamaica, which is why many mechanics of the Honduran banana Company railroads were Jamaican. The forcing of the repatriation of Black English speakers in the 1930’s does seem to have opened high level jobs to Garifunas who went to high school, and United Fruit might have been a forcé to require the government to open the high schools. Highly educated Garifunas from important banana towns where there were high schools dominate most Garifuna institutions, except women’s dance clubs,  in Honduras.

Herman Alvarez the Garifuna painter from San Juan said that few Garifuna men accepted agricultural work in the actual banana camps.  If they did accept the work and carried around a machete and wore a hat to protect them from the sun, the other Garifuna men made fun of them, and called them, “indios”.   Garifuna women are the main farmers among the Garifunas, although some Garifuna men will farm, especially plantains.    It is not clear if Garifuna men from Iriona or Limon accepted actual agricultural work in the nearby banana camps. 

Derek Parent said that the railroad line, which is still partially visible between Sico and Limon, was about 1 km inland from the Coast near Limon. In the jobs Sarah England mentions for the Garifuna men from Limon with the banana company, mostly I remember yardero, or working on the dock in Trujillo. She mentions two other jobs that I do not remember in her book on Afro-Central Americans in New York.   However, there was lots of other work, like cutting mahoghany and other trees, laying rails, making the sleepers, building the barracones where the workers lived and the offices, even the railroad cars were made of mahoghany.

According to an article in La Gazeta in the 19^th century by E.Q. Squiers, the US consul to Honduras,  he said Garifunas virtually dominated the cutting of mahoghany in Honduras. There are old iron broad axes that were used to cut the mahoghany trees in the Rufino Galan Museum in Trujillo. Older Garifunas like Sebastian Marin remember hearing about their grandfathers talking about working with the bull gangs cutting mahoghany. Both his grandfather and Fausto Miguel’s grandfather had cut mahoghany in Nicaragua with Fausto Miguel’s grandfather dying and being buried there. The Garifunas used mahoghany in many of their crafts and for making canoes and so had centuries of experience cutting mahoghany.  

The cutting of mahoghany for free was included in the Truxillo’s railroad concession. The Pech say when the Truxillo Railroad left the Olancho and Sico área, they just abandoned tons of cut hardwoods. The Garifuna men also built the dam at Rio Negro which supplied water for Puerto Castilla about 16 km. away.  A bad storm caused it to be washed away and they had to rebuild it.  The Garifuna men hauled bananas which at that time were shipped by the stem. 

When mahoghany cutting switched to chain saws and the hauling of mahoghany by flat bed trucks called “rastres” and the sawmills were owned by Ladino families like ex-president Mel Zelaya’s family, the ethnicity of mahoghany cutters changed mostly to Ladinos, although some Miskitos log mahoghany in the Mosquitia,  complicating conservation efforts there. 

For a brief period in the 1950’s Black English speaking Belizean woodcutters were brought in cut mahoghany.  For example, the Capiro and Calentura mountains behind Trujillo, now a National Park, were logged for mahoghany in the 1950’s by a ship that brought their own Belizeans woodcutters, according to Garifuna Fausto Miguel Alvarez.  The presence of English speaking Black Belizeans in the mixed Garifuna, Miskito, Black English speaker community of Plaplaya, in the Mosquitia dates from around 1950 when Belizean wood cutters were brought in to work at a sawmill there.  The sawmill closed and the Belizeans did not have money to go home and the owner of the sawmill just deserted them there, according to the Garifuna teacher who taught there.   In the 2001 census less than 20 people in Plaplaya declared themselves as Black English speakers.

Although in Ross Graham’s article on English speakers in Honduras says Plaplaya was founded by Black English speakers, I do not actually know who founded Plaplaya, the last Garifuna dominated village in the Mosquitia. According to an article on Guatemalan Garifunas, Plaplaya was founded by the Green family coming from the Bay Islands. There are currently Black English speakers, Garifunas, and Latinos with the last name of Green in Honduras.

 The community of Cauquira, on the Caratasca Lagoon in the Mosquitia, was not founded by Bay Islanders. It was a Miskito village at the time of the Miskito king, because there is a neighborhood there called “Casa Quemada” in Miskito.  The story behind this name is that the capitan in charge of this area disobeyed the Miskito king, and the Miskito king came to punish him.  He did not find him, but he did burn down his house.  I missed a great opportunity, because the last granddaughter of the last Miskito king lived in Cauquira in the “Casa Quemada”  neighborhood to age 106 and was still there when I was writing the History of the Mosquitia (Los Miskitos) in 1996. But I did not find any one to go with me and she only spoke Miskito, so I did not interview her.  She was still called  “Plaisni”, which means “secalecha” or the last baby in Miskito until she died at age 106. 

In the period between 1899 when United Fruit was founded and  1913 when they start to build at Castilla, the United Fruit bought the shipping lines that called at Trujillo like the Oteri Lines and the Bluefields Steamship Company.  These companies would come and buy bananas directly from producers, which included Garifunas. Both Garifuna men and women would harvest their bananas either by contract or during an open cut just when the ship showed up, and the men and the women would go out in canoes from the area around Jerico (a Barrio of Trujillo) and load the bananas directly on the boat.

There is a story that the ship captains would hire Garifuna canoe paddlers to go up and down the coast announcing either an open cut, for anyone that had bananas, or a cut just for people who had contracts with the shipping  line.  I was told the government required the banana companies to build a real dock, instead of just taking the bananas out by canoe from the beach.  The government also limited which places could be used as ports, killing the port business in Iriona, Limon, and Palacios.

 When the United Fruit  Company switched to growing its own bananas,  the Garifuna women harvested their produce including plantains, coconuts, okra, and fine white yams and sold it to the workers in Puerto Castilla.  The Garifuna women of Trujillo also made breads like cassava bread (known as pan de yuca in Spanish and cassava pone in the Carribean) and other breads like coconut bread,   and traveled by train to sell them to the workers in Castilla.  Most people did not buy their bread from a bakery, but rather from Garifuna women.  The Garifuna women also sold firewood.  The big iron stoves imported from the US in the Trujillo Museum show even in the well to do house they cooked with firewood in the Trujillo area. Both my Friends Jeca and Yaya remember accompanying their mothers to sell in Puerto Castilla. Balbina Chimilio’s aunts told her about their experiences selling on the docks of the United Fruit Company in Puerto Castilla.

Balbina told me of a White sailor, Spanish, who saw a Garifuna girl selling breads and fruits on the dock and fell in love. When her parents found out about this sailor being interested in their daughter, they did not send her to Puerto Castilla anymore and  hid her in Barranco. The Spanish sailor got a translator and went to Barranco and since the girl’s parents were not there, talked to the girl’s grandmother. They eventually got married, he moved to Barranco with her,learned to do Garifuna style agricultura like “chapear” with a machete and they had 10 children, of which the grandgrandchildren still live in Trujillo.

 Jeca who is around 76 years old said her mother cooked over a low clay sided wood burning fire, but put a “lamina” (corregated zinc usually used for roofs) on top of it and put the metal pots on top of that. Into the 1970’s, there are photos of Garifuna women cooking breads under “laminas” with burning coconut shells on top.  Now Hondurans sell special flat metal pieces called “planchas” to put above a wood fireplace or “fogon”, and most of the Garifunas of Trujillo cook with natural gas in “chimbos” (tanks).  I was surprised how many imported things relatively humble Garifunas had in their houses in the 1920’s like cots made of cloth, blue denim hammocks, laminas for cooking, metal pots and imported cloth for dresses. I asked about shoes, because Trujillo had a shoe Factory and the United Fruit commissary reportedly sold good shoes at a modest Price, but Yaya said the Garifunas were all “chuña” barefeet.

The Garifuna men fished and their wives and children often cooked the fish to sell to the other inhabitants of Trujillo.Another job that the increased population of Trujillo brought in an increased need for was midwife and traditional healer. My Garifuna friend Yaya  said she served as midwife for the “indios” (mestizos) from the banana camps as well as ladinos, Garifunas and Black English speakers in Trujillo.  So there was interaction of the Garifuna women with the banana company workers, if not as direct employees of the Banana company. Some of the Black English speakers married Garifuna women and stayed in Honduras like the Jackson family of Puerto Castilla. The head of the Mascaro dance group of Santa Rosa de Aguan was for many years a Jamaican who had immigrated to Honduras to work for the banana companies.

Yaya’s cousin originally was going to have a Black English speaking woman as her midwife, so the interethnic of use of midwives went both ways. The nurses at the Puerto Castillo hospital included both Black English speaking women and Ladino nurses. Allen, a Ladino man from La Lima, his father was an American who worked for the Truxillo Railroad and his mother a nurse at the hospital of Puerto Castillo, and they got married. When the Truxillo Railroad closed, his father apparantly switched to the Tela Railroad subsidiary of United Fruit. Some of the technical positions of the hospitals were also filled by Garifunas like Antonieta Maximo’s Garifuna father Quintin Maximo was head of the Microbiology Dept. at the La Lima Hospital of United Fruit.

Yaya reports “indias” and black English speaking women ingleses coming to see her as a midwife even when there was the Company hospitals in Puerto Castilla and when she lived in La Ceiba where the Standard Fruit hospital D’Antoni is still very active. She told one woman who came to see her inla Ceiba as a midwife, “Here there are two hospitals.” The woman answered “Ni siguiera Dios” (not even if God wants it.) One of the patients she delivered in La Ceiba was a Black English woman whose family was from Guanaja. That woman actually had the baby said I am going  out, and then did not come back. Months passed and she did not come back.Yaya was going to raise the baby. Finally she came back and asked for the baby. Her husband was a sailor and she had the baby with another man while he was gone, but he forgave her,and she came back to get the baby.

Traditional healers were also important along the line of the Truxillo Railroad because of the danger of being bitten by barba amarilla or lance de fer snakes. The Truxillo Railroad had a serpentarium in Trujillo to study the 7 classes of poinsonous snakes in Honduras, and they were prepared to treat poisonous snakebites at their hospital in Puerto Castillo,but it took allday to get from Sico to Trujillo by train as they stopped picking up bananas. In 45 minutes after the lance de fer bite, the person could be dead if not treated.  Pech, Miskito, Garifuna, and Tawahka traditional healers who were working in the área saved most of the lives of the workers who were bitten by snakes. The number of Truxillo Railroad workers who died from violence due to revolutions or personalfights while drunk was much higher than losses of life due to malaria or snake bite, indicating the traditional healing did help.

Whites of Trujillo also sometimes used traditional healers if conventional medicine did not work such as when Yaya healed the son of the Melahdo family were merchants,the Lloyds of London bróker for Trujillo and the British Consul in Trujillo and at one point were both the Britsh Consul and the Mayor of Trujillo at the same time.  Although Garifunas were concerned about Black English speakers as users of witchcraft, they also sometimes permitted them to use traditional medicines to heal their family members.

For example, Doña Sasa was unable to walk for several months when she was about 11 years old. Her father took her to the hospital in Castilla and there was talk of taking her to the United Fruit hospital in Costa Rica. But a tall Jamaican man came and said I can cure her, and asked permission to try. The father gave permission, and he made a linament, and said I will put this on her about 4 pm and wrap her up in bandages. When she sweats, change the bandages. At 2 am after not having walked for several months, Sasa got up and walked to her parent’s room and said I am sweating. They changed the bandages. After that she did not have problems with her legs until she was 85 and developed arthritis in her knees.

 Shortly after that the Jamaican man was deported back to Jamaica as part of the mass deportation of Trujillo Black English speakers in the 1930’s in response to anti-Black worker riots and new Honduran laws which prohibited Black immigrants even as tourists.  Doña Sasa commented, Carias thought it was better that these people should go, but some of them had experience.  Yaya also Heard of a man who cured epilepsy with plants. One treatment and no more epilepsy.

After the Truxillo closed and took up the rails and the bridges, the Garifuna communities of the Mosquitia and Colon remained isolated.  Some Garifunas from Plaplaya tried bringing plantains to Trujillo to sell by canoe, but they were ruined in the long trip from La Mosquitia. When they took up the rails to Saba, it was necessary to walk to Elixir which is on the other side of Saba to catch the Standard Fruit Company train to La Ceiba.

At some point there was air service between Trujillo and La Ceiba, which was not expensive the Garifunas said. Johnny Glyn’s was where they bought the tickets.  Not until the 1970’s were there good roads connecting Trujillo and La Ceiba, again, as part of the development of the Agrarian Reform in the Bajo Aguan around Tocoa on lands previously held by the Truxillo Railroad which had formally been set aside as areas of “colonialización” (colonias agricolas were the precursors of the Agrarian Reform in Honduras) after the Truxillo Railroad left. With these new roads and in response to the population growth in Honduras, hundreds and eventually thousands of Ladinos arrived on the edges and the lands of Garifuna communities of Colon, eventually making it near impossible for Garifunas to farm or make crafts from forest products, which has also fueled immigration.

Although some books like Keri Brondo’s Land Grab says that there was little Garifuna participation with the banana companies after the 1910’s, in fact family and personal histories of the Garifunas in the Trujillo and Santa Fe, Guadelupe áreas show that Garifunas were still working with Standard Fruit in Yoro and Atlantida at least through the 1960’s. Some older men who worked many years for Standard Fruit include Julio Ariola, originally from Santa Rosa de Aguan, who after working for Standard Fruit went on to become a radio news reporter for national radio, based in Trujillo, and Francisco “Pancho” David, head of the Los Menudos musical group and the principal Garifuna drum maker in Trujillo. His family lived in Barranco when he was Young. He said he brought the récipe for  guiffity the Garifuna Garifuna herbal wine up from Yoro where he learned it in the banana fields there.   In Santa Fe Garifunas in their 40’s  remember sleeping in the railroad cars of the Standard Fruit and when they needed workers in distinct plantations, the company would move the railroad car with all of the workers sleeping in it.

Honduras’s Other Important Fruits—Coconuts and Cohune Oil Palm

 Coconut production among Garifunas and Bay Islanders continued after the Truxillo Railroad left, and boats like those of Johnny Glynn’s family took the coconuts to sell to La Blanquita, a subsidiary of Standard Fruit that made “manteca” vegetable shortening in La Ceiba.  According to Profesor Batiz Garífuna coconut production increased after 1904 when the technique for hydrogenizing oil was found and coconuts were in demand first for making soap and only later for making shortening and margenine. United Fruit also founded companies to make cooking oil, shortening, margering, and soap, which is part of what gave a big start to the industrial growth of San Pedro Sula. Coconuts were bought very cheaply, about 3 centavos a piece. In the Bay Islands the old people remember processing the coconut meat at copra for sale to the boats that came to buy in the Bay Islands and how hot a work it was to process and carry copra.  In spite of the availability of commercially made oil and vegetable shortening “manteca”, people still bought coconut oil from Garifuna women who would process 50 coconuts at a time.

The Garifunas, Bay Islanders and the Ladinos, and probably the Pech of Silin outside of Trujillo, also collected cohune “corrozo” nuts and cracked them open  and sold the nuts “almendras”  to owners of boats and merchants like the Crespos of Trujillo which sold them to factories for example in Puerto Cortes to make oil. Then about 60 years ago, Standard Fruit began importing African Palms, partly to hold and use the land affected by banana disease, later so did the Tela Railroad Company, and after that the demand of coconuts fell and for cohune nuts disappeared except as Garifuna crafts like traditional cohune nut pipes with bamboo stems used both for recreational smoking and ceremonies. 

The original boom for North Coast cohune nuts was in the 1910’s, when cohune nuts were discovered to make the best charcoal for filters for gas masks during World War I and hundreds of thousands of pounds of cohune nuts were imported to the States.  Atlantida and the Tawahka region of the Patuca were identified as heavy areas of native cohune palms. The demand for that use died after that War.

 Cohune palms in Honduras are more famous for their leaves used to thatch houses (la manaca) among Bay Islanders, Garifunas and Ladinos. The Garifunas used to make whole habitational houses of them, though now they are still used only for the traditional ceremony “dugu”.  In the Bay Islands, the cohune palm is called “thatchlog” and James Thomas, a Black Bay Islander of Roatan has shown me a traditional round Bay Islands house with the roof and the walls and the door made of thatchlog that he made to show people how Bay Islanders used to live.  Later Bay Islanders adopted wooden houses up on pilings and often partially over the water.  Most people in the Bay Islands and the North Coast of Honduras now have zinc roofs. The Miskito hair care product “batana” is made from the seed of the American oil palm but the the Miskitos of the Zona Recuperada also make the meat of this palm nut into a kind of porridge that no other group in Honduras eats.  While Miskito batana production has grown in recent years to meet the demands of the Canadian Company Ojon (The Miskito Word for the Corozo palm) for batana which they incorpórate into hair care products, the Pech and Garifuna Project to collect corozo nuts which Miguel Facusse’s Dinant Corporation processes into oil has been a source of considerable discontent particularly in the Pech communities outside of Trujillo.

  The coconut production has fallen off greatly on the North Coast and the Bay Islands  as a result of Lethal Yellowing Coconut disease around the time of Hurricane Mitch in 1998 which has wiped out most of the coconuts there.  Garifunas in Trujillo now mostly use canned coconut milk from Thailand, although a few Garifuna ladies who make coconut bread and other traditional breads for sale pay Ladinos with trucks to bring them real coconuts from unaffected parts of Olancho.  In addition to the Atlantic Tall coconut trees, the Pech report that Lethal Yellowing killed the Coyol Palms used to make the traditional drink in Olancho “vino de coyol”.     

After the closing of the Truxillo Railroad, some Garifuna men went to other areas like around La Ceiba to work for Standard Fruit.  For example, my friend Don Beto was barman at a club of the Standard Fruit in la Ceiba. Books on Garifuna organizations mention Garifuna workers in the mechanical workshop in La Ceiba before the 1954 strike. 

Other Garifunas worked as merchant marines, first for banana companies and then expanding to work for other companies.  My friend Sebastian Marín first worked for Banco Atlantida en Tela, but he only earned $1 a day, so he became a sailor with World Wide Shipping, part of United Fruit, and sailed as a merchant marine for 35 years. His brother in law also worked as a sailor for United Fruit, shipping out of Tela. Herman Alvarez’s father was a sailor for United Fruit.

Sebastian Marin worked for 35 years for Worldwide Shipping, part of United Fruit.  He said Garifunas who became US citizens got pensions and Social Security for working as sailors for United Fruit, but people who kept their Honduran citizenship got almost nothing, a small lump sum when they retired from the Sindicato Hondureño de Marineros, based in Puerto Cortés.  He used his lump sum to build a small house in Cristales and lived on money sent back to him by his daughter who became an economist in New York and his wife who stayed in the States working and taking care of grandchildren, plus he helped an American in Trujillo Peggy Brinkley buy Garifuna land and he got a commission.  The Bay Islander sailors also talk about having difficult retirements, like Dorn Ebanks’ father who worked over 30 years as a merchant marine, but each time he shipped out it was often for a different company and he kept his Honduran citizenship. So when he retired, he got nothing. He was injured and lost the vision in one eye, but he also received no compensation for that.  

 

Apparantly when white sailors were called up for duty during the Second World War, there was a shortage of sailors and this was the start of the opportunity for Garifuna and Bay Islander sailors.   The ships of the Great white fleet of United Fruit and Standard Fruit were commandeered by the US government to haul provisions for US troops during the Second World War, together with their crew. My Garifuna friend Sebastian Marin was in Pearl  Harbor after it was bombed. He said many Garifuna men were on these ships during World War II. Other Garifuna men from Trujillo worked in the Canal Zone in Panama during the War, as well as serving the US Naval base in Trujillo, Honduras which was charged with protecting the Caribbean from German submarines.   Garifuna sailors who served as merchant marines on the Great White Fleet during the Second World War are eligible for having their names added to the World War II Memorial database in Washington, DC.

The sailors continued to work for United Fruit or other shipping lines after the 1954 strike, but most Garifunas in Honduras no longer worked for the banana companies after the 1954 strike, although a few still reported working for them in the 1960’s.  When Sabas Whittaker, a black English speaker from Puerto Cortes, became a sailor at age 15 about 30 years ago, all he had to do was ask the captain if he would hire him, and he became a sailor. Now it is required to pass a one week course in Spanish in Omoa in basic seamanship at a sailor’s school, plus some other short courses like Control of Crowds. Between the bus fare, paying to stay in a hotel, food, and the tuition, it costs about $1,000.  It is also necessary to get a Honduran passport in La Ceiba which is expensive and go to Tegucigalpa to get a Seaman’s Book and return when you get the letter offering you work to Tegucigalpa to get the US visa which costs $100 just for the appointment, plus bus fare, hotel, food, etc. Many shipping lines now want you have a high school diploma and to speak English or even Italian. Becoming a sailor is no longer an option for the poor Garifuna boys.

And the pay is lower than it used to be. Bay Islanders used to report salaries like $1,500 -$2,000 a month. A Garifuna friend got an offer recently of $440 a month for working 70 hour weeks, with the possibility of overtime at $2.20 an hour. The shipping lines say it is so low, because they are also paying room and board. Garifunas recommend friends and family to get offers of work from shipping lines, which lets you start the process for the Seaman’s Book and the US visa.  Bay Islanders have complained of corruption in Tegucigalpa regarding Seaman’s Book which are supposed to be free, but the Honduran officials sometimes charge to issue them. There have also been people in the US who charge Hondurans to get them the letter offering them the job, again limiting the possibilities of poor Honduran boys.

The practice of recommending family to work on ships is apparrantly a long standing practice.  Garifuna artist Herman Alvarez who is about 60 years old said his uncle worked as a sailor and got an offer of work for him.  His mother received it, but she did not give it to him, because she was angry at him because he spent his time making lines on paper (drawing), and gave the offer of work to his brother.  His brother still works as a sailor and Herman was soon thereafter conscripted into the Army expressly because the colonel in charge of the Batallon in Siguatepeque wanted him and his companions to sing in a band (conjunto) for the Army there. The colonel sent a car and recruiters who went to Tela and expressly picked him up to be in the Army, because the coronel had previously sung in a band with him. So he spent three years in the Army in Siguatepeque singing (mostly salsa and meringue, not Garifuna music), and  when he got out of the Army, he was a professional singer for several years, singing all over Honduras with groups like the Silver Stars of La Lima.  He even recorded a record of salsa music in New York, I believe with Los Profesionales, the first Honduran Garifuna band to record a record.   While he was a singer, he was in “union libre” with a ladina granddaughter of President Juan Manuel Galvez with whom he had 3 children. They met in Tegucigalpa.  The children are now adults and live in the States.

About 75% of the Garifuna population of San Juan now live in the States, so it is unusual that he has remained. His brother is so resentful that Herman did not “work”, and instead did things like dance internationally for the Garifuna Folkloric Ballet, sing, and sell paintings of scenes of Garifuna culture to tourists in Tela, that they have fought over the inheritance of Herman’s father’s house with machetes. Recently the brother finally tore down the house Herman inherited from his father one time while Herman was away dancing for the Garifuna Folkloric Ballet, so that now he has no house of his own and few international tourists arrive in Tela due to the crime reports of Honduras (highest per capita murder rate in the World, higher than Iraq or the Congo).  San Pedro was not like that before. The older Garifuna women like Doña Jeca say they felt no fear when they sold coconut bread in the Street in San Pedro when they were younger. In her case, her mother moved to San Pedro because she was sick and was in San Pedro to get treatment.

Herman Alvarez  reports Honduran Ladinos don’t want to pay high prices ($75-$100) for a painting.  For example, the owner of Cesar Marisco’s  in Tela offered him only $15 for two paintings combined, even though the owners of the restaurants and hotels turn around and the sell the paintings on the walls to clients from San Pedro or Tegucigalpa.  While Garifuna painter Cruz Bermudez still does OK selling paintings mostly to Canadians who stay at Villas Telamar in front of his gallery, Herman Alvarez and the very talented Ladino painter Napoleon Villalta Crespo in Tela who no longer have a gallery to show in since the closing of Gallery Eldon (owned by a foreigner who returned to the States) and the the Garifuna Museum of Tela (the Garifuna owner immigrated to Canada) have fallen on hard times. 

The old management of Villas Telamar bought over the years a collection of over 200 paintings by Napolean Villalta Crespo and in addition gave him the work of painting the guest houses inside and out, so he used to do OK.  But the management changed of Villas Telamar (the old complex for the executives of United Fruit) and no longer buys his paintings and do not hire him to paint houses, so now over 60 years old Villalta resorts to doing odd jobs around town and has no time to paint.    The Crespo family is originally a Spanish merchant family which settled inTrujillo, but Napoleon Villalta’s father was offered a job with the Tela Railroad so they moved to Tela, where he lives “along the line”. 

The Tela Railroad was still operating as a railroad when I arrived in Honduras in 1985, and I had the opportunity to travel in its wooden cars between Tela and San Pedro Sula.  I especially liked the tickets which were long and had the names of each banana plantation on it where the Railroad stopped, like  Kilometer 105. The train stopped at the different plantations and picked up cars full of bananas along the way.  At Baracoa, part of the train was switched and went to Puerto Cortes to be exported, and the rest of the train went to San Pedro Sula. Ladino food sellers tried to take advantage of people changing trains to sell them something to eat like montucas, a type of typical Honduran tamale with meat.

A tropical storm or hurricane washed out a bridge between Tela and San Pedro, and since by then there was a good road network the Honduran government decided to not restore the bridge and the bananas leave Atlantida for Puerto Cortes by container truck. The Honduran government sold the old railroad station inTela to some people who wanted to make a Banana Days Musuem of it, but then they found the Tela city government had sold most of the railroad paraphenalia around Tela as scap metal for which they would have received L1 (5 US cents) a pound.  The only part of the Standard Fruit’s railroad still functioning is travelling by hand truck into the Cuero y Salado National Park located between La Ceiba and Trujillo. They too have switched to shipping by container truck.