Before the Marines came the lawyers. Before the bananas came the sugar.

In 1898, the United States joined Cuba's war for independence, and never quite left. What followed was four years of military occupation, a constitution written with American conditions baked in, and a 99-year naval lease on a bay called Guantanamo. Cuba became a republic with an asterisk: sovereign in name, managed in practice.

In this first episode from Farms and Frontlines, Max Terzano and Jessica Rudo trace how that arrangement worked, politically, through the Platt Amendment, economically through the sugar industry that U.S. corporations came to dominate. By the 1920s, American firms owned more than 60% of Cuban sugar production. When the boom collapsed, U.S. banks absorbed the wreckage. Cubans were left to draw their own conclusions.

This is Part 1 of a six-episode series on the Banana Wars — the occupations, interventions, and corporate entanglements that defined American power in the Caribbean Basin from 1898 through the early 1930s. Cuba is where it began.

Sign up for our newsletter!

We’re kicking off our most ambitious series yet with an overview of the Banana Wars, a sweeping chapter of U.S. history that stretches from 1898 to 1934, with consequences that echo into the present day. In this episode, we lay the groundwork: what the Banana Wars were, why they happened, and how something as simple as a piece of fruit became a driver of military intervention, foreign policy, and corporate power.

Max and Jess explore how U.S. fruit companies, especially the United Fruit Company, built vast plantation empires across Central America and the Caribbean, reshaping local economies into single-export “banana republics,” a term popularized by O. Henry in Cabbages and Kings. They unpack how railroads, ports, and shipping networks tied farm systems to frontline systems, and how U.S. Marines repeatedly intervened to protect American economic interests under doctrines like the Monroe Doctrine.

Along the way, they trace how bananas went from rare luxury to America’s most consumed fruit by the 1920s, thanks in part to master propagandist Edward Bernays, who rebranded bananas as a daily health necessity.

This episode sets the stage for a deep dive into Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and beyond, as Farms and Frontlines examines how agriculture, corporate logistics, and military force combined to shape U.S. power in the Caribbean basin.

Sign up for our newsletter!

In this second part of our Edward Bernays series, we move from cigarettes and bacon to coups and Cold War politics. Max and Jess pick up where the last episode left off, diving into Bernays’ early work during World War I and how it shaped the modern world of propaganda, public relations, and mass persuasion.

First, they explore Bernays’ role in the U.S. government’s Committee on Public Information, the first large-scale American propaganda machine, and how he learned to shape public opinion by appealing to emotion instead of reason. Those wartime lessons would become the foundation of the public relations industry.

Then the story shifts south to Guatemala in the 1950s, where Bernays worked for the United Fruit Company. As land reforms threatened the company’s massive holdings, Bernays launched a sweeping PR campaign in the United States, framing Guatemala as a communist threat. That narrative helped build public support for a CIA-backed coup that overthrew the country’s democratically elected government.

It is a conversation about influence, corporate power, Cold War paranoia, and the long shadow of one man’s ideas. As always, we leave it up to you to decide whether Bernays was a genius, a villain, or something more complicated.

Sign up for our newsletter!