Globalized Fruit, Local Entrepreneurs. Douglas Southgate
in and around the city were reputed to be made of the “strongest and best” timber in the world.21 In the mid-1800s, entrepreneurs from the costa organized the production of tightly woven straw hats, which they sold to gold miners crossing the Panamanian Isthmus on their way to California. These Forty-Niners, who risked exposure to tropical diseases to avoid trekking all the way across North America, mistook the origin of their purchases. Hence, the name they gave their new headgear, Panama hats, is still used today, more than 160 years later.22 Guayaquil’s merchants played a key role in the cacao boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s.23 More recently, Ecuadorian entrepreneurs have exported shrimp and cut flowers. Local businessmen and women also have worked hard to make their country a favored destination for international tourists.
As one commercial opportunity overseas has been exploited, then another, and so on, business services that the costa formerly lacked have been introduced. For example, Juan F. Marcos built up a sizable enterprise around the turn of the twentieth century dedicated to the management of cacao estates. His approach to client recruitment was simple. An estate owner would be asked how much he or she expected to earn on his or her own, without any specialized assistance. Provided the response to this inquiry was realistic and less than 40,000 sucres per annum, which is worth about $300,000 in today’s money, Marcos would then offer to administer the property, receiving half the income in excess of the figure the owner had named and nothing else.24 This arrangement was accepted nearly every time it was proposed and, with the profits Marcos made, he founded the Sociedad General: a diversified firm that possessed a commercial bank, an insurance company (responding to a strong demand in Guayaquil, with its prevalence of flammable, wooden structures), as well as the huge El Guasmo hacienda on the outskirts of the city and several other rural properties.25
Marcos had a son, Juan X. Marcos, whose encounter with governmental authority at a tender age did little to encourage political engagement on his part, as would have been necessary for a career in rent-seeking. During violent clashes between opposing political parties in 1910, the privileged son of the founder of the Sociedad General had rushed outside the family home in central Guayaquil to investigate the commotion for himself. Nine years old at the time, he was punished for his curiosity with a sharp blow to the forehead, administered by a member of the armed forces. This left the younger Marcos with a permanent scar and, one must suppose, a lasting wariness of the rough and tumble of Ecuadorian politics. After expressing a desire at an early age to study medicine, he decided to join the family business instead.
As partners at the Sociedad General, the Marcoses offered business services in support of overseas trade, including export financing and insurance as well as the brokering of cargo space on oceangoing vessels. The Sociedad General also became the local agent for shipping companies such as Cunard White Star Line and Holland America. Simultaneously, the firm engaged in international trade on its own, exporting rice for example.
From Humble Beginnings
Many of Guayaquil’s entrepreneurs were from the costa’s leading families. This was true of the Marcoses, for instance, who could trace their ancestry to colonial times. However, Noboa’s employment at the Sociedad General and his subsequent rise into the commercial elite demonstrate that upward economic mobility was possible in the costa. The same can be said of northeastern Colombia. For example, Pepe Vives, a leading exporter of bananas from the region during the 1950s, was not “a member of any of the traditional, powerful families in the region and (was) without formal education.” Regardless, he was able to amass “a fortune with his own commercial, financial, and manufacturing businesses.”26 In no sense is the costa or northeastern Colombia egalitarian. However, the barriers to advancement are much worse in places where a land-holding gentry is in complete control, as was true in highland Ecuador well into the twentieth century. Where commerce dominates, as it does in downtown Guayaquil, lofty material aspirations are not completely unrealistic for someone with talent who is willing to work hard.
Even in rural areas, the banana business has provided opportunities for individuals whose origins were modest. One such individual was Manuel Amable-Calle, who was born in 1893 to a rural washerwoman and began his business career when he was all of ten years old. Fashioning a raft by lashing together a few pieces of wood, Amable-Calle ferried people and their goods across the Río Jubones, south of Guayaquil and not too far from Ecuador’s border with Peru. By 1920, he was able to purchase fertile land on the southern shore of the river, where he produced food for the Guayaquil market.27 A decade later, Amable-Calle was a shopkeeper and the leading resident of El Pasaje, up the Río Jubones from the coastal city of Machala. Around that time, SAFCO representatives persuaded him to raise bananas for export. Soon afterward, he planted the Gros Michel variety on his farm and convinced other growers in the area to do the same. By the late 1930s, his own harvests combined with his purchases of neighbors’ output were sizable enough for him to make weekly deliveries to the Chilean firm’s ships anchored in the river by Guayaquil.28
In July 1941, the Peruvian army invaded southern Ecuador, doing much damage in El Pasaje and a number of other towns and cities. Amable-Calle and his family had no choice other than to abandon their farm and flee. Returning home in January 1942, Amable-Calle replanted and, because bananas from his farm could be floated down to Machala in small boats, he was producing fruit again for overseas markets within six months, at which time banana exports were grinding to a halt because of World War II.29
After the global conflict, few people in the Ecuadorian countryside seized opportunities in the banana business better than Esteban Quirola, who was born in 1924 and spent his early years on a small farm on the banks of the Río Jubones. After working part-time on the farm and in a local shop before he was a teenager, Quirola moved at fourteen to Guayaquil, where an older brother with a small grocery employed him. Every day before school, he rose early, went to the central market, bargained with farmers over the produce they had brought to the port city to sell, and took his purchases on the streetcar to his brother’s store. The commercial skills gained from this experience were further honed after Quirola joined the Ecuadorian army in 1944 and served his eighty-man detachment as a purchasing agent. After completing his military service in late 1945, Quirola rented a small cacao farm near his birthplace. He plowed all his earnings into real estate and, within a few years, started raising bananas. Totaling twenty-five to thirty hectares in 1950, Quirola’s holdings dedicated to fruit production increased at a fast pace.30 Ten years later, he was one of the leading landowners in the southern costa, with thousands of hectares planted to bananas.
Of all the South Americans who have prospered in the banana business, none had a more difficult start in life than Segundo Wong, who was born in Guayaquil in 1929 to an Ecuadorian woman who had married a Chinese immigrant. Wong’s father disappeared when the future bananero was fifteen; the elder Wong either died or left the port city—no one seems to know for sure. Wong’s mother passed away soon afterward, which left him to care for himself as well as several younger siblings. After scrambling for jobs in the port city, Wong found employment with a cattle rancher, which enabled him to learn about rural enterprises. He went on to trade bananas on a small scale, buying fruit from farmers and selling to exporters in Guayaquil. Wong subsequently found work with a banana planter in Quevedo who was also named Segundo Wong but was not a relative. Given the coincidence of a shared name, the planter delegated a number of business-related tasks to his employee, who not only gained knowledge about banana production but ended up buying his boss’s entire operation.31
Wong would go on to become one of the costa’s leading growers, nearly on a par with Quirola. He also became a successful exporter, with accomplishments in overseas markets rivaling those of Noboa.
A Tycoon’s Early Years
If Wong’s beginnings in life were less auspicious than those of other leading bananeros in Latin America, Noboa took the longest path from humble origins to success in the tropical fruit business. The future entrepreneur was eight years old in 1924, when his father received a fatal kick from a horse. His mother, Zoila Naranjo de Noboa, was pregnant at the time and living with her three sons in northern Chile, where she had migrated with her husband a few years earlier. Aside from three gold sovereigns, worth about $150 apiece, the young widow had nothing