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Rail Road
Travel
to Costa Rica
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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