Rail Road

Trains, bananas, chocolate, and gold: The oxcart, which has become something of a national symbol of Costa Rica, was instrumental in transporting sacks of coffee beans from the Central Valley to the port of Puntarenas, but this was made possible only after the path through the mountains was sufficiently widened in the mid-1840's to allow the oxcarts to replace mules as a form of transportation. Nevertheless, shipping coffee to England from the Pacific side of the country meant a long, arduous voyage around Cape Horn. The obvious solution was to open a route that would link the Central Valley with the Caribbean coast. And the way to do it? A railroad!

In 1884, the Costa Rican government signed a contract with Minor Keith, a North American who agreed to construct a narrow-gauge railroad from San José to Limón in exchange for 300,000 hectares of land on the Atlantic side of the country. On this vast acreage Keith began banana production, and in 1899 joined with the Boston Fruit Company to form the United Fruit Company.

Afro-American laborers were brought from Jamaica to work the banana plantations and build the railroad because they were better adapted to the climatic conditions of the Caribbean lowlands than were the European-descended inhabitants of the Central Valley. Due to the relative isolation of the banana producing regions from the other populated areas of the country, a unique culture evolved on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica with a distinctive Jamaican flavor.

By 1913, Costa Rica was one of the world's leading banana exporters, although coffee was still the nation's principal foreign revenue earner. At about this same time, the United Fruit Company began converting some of its extensive monoculture banana plantations to cacao because of a fungal disease, known as "Panama disease," that was affecting the bananas. By 1925, cacao figured third on the country's list of export products.

Minor Keith also used his fortune in the purchase of 40,000 hectares of land in the Tilarán mountains, where he started the Abangares Gold Mining Company. Although seemingly worlds apart, this gold mining operation held much in common with the way banana production was carried out. Immigrant labor from Honduras, Nicaragua, and also Jamaica was employed along with Costa Rican workers. The work was demanding, and even though well-paid, the workers were isolated in the mining villages and had little choice but to spend their hard-earned pay in the company store owned by the mining company.

Since most of Keith's holdings were essentially vertical monopolies whose production came from land they owned or controlled, and his dealings with the government gave him the advantage of numerous tax breaks, a relatively small percentage of the income generated by his various activities ever entered the national economy.

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