Strong Wind

Strong Wind is the first of Miguel Asturias' controversial Banana Republic books indicting North American exploitation of a Central American republic. In this novel, the banana plantations are dominated by Tropical Banana, Inc., a powerful North American fruit company. Laid out with forbidding symmetry in the torrid malarial lowlands, the plantations burgeon with wealth and injustice. The drama and epic excitement of the story concern the uprising of the peasants against Tropical Banana, Inc., run invisibly by absentee investors and a sinister chairman known as the Green Pope. Asturias vividly conveys the customs, pace of life, and sorrows of these downtrodden people.