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.

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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.

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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.

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In this episode of Farms and Frontlines, Max and Jess dive into the unsettling origins of modern advertising, consumer culture, and even the American breakfast. The conversation centers on Edward Bernays, the pioneer of public relations and nephew of Sigmund Freud, whose ideas reshaped how Americans think, buy, and eat. From engineering the bacon and eggs breakfast through manufactured medical consensus to reframing cigarettes as symbols of women’s liberation, Bernays pioneered techniques that blurred the line between information and manipulation. The episode explores how advertising shifted from meeting basic needs to shaping identity, desire, and behavior, laying the groundwork for today’s media saturated world. Along the way, Max and Jess wrestle with the uncomfortable legacy of brilliance used in service of profit, power, and control, and ask listeners to reflect on how often our choices are truly our own.Sign up for our newsletter!

Honey is supposed to be one of the purest foods on earth. So why is global honey production rising while bee populations are collapsing?
In this episode, Max and Jess follow the sticky trail from declining pollinator health to a massive international fraud known as Honeygate. We explore collapsing colonies, crop monocultures, honey laundering, and why so much cheap honey on store shelves isn’t honey at all.
We also dig into what consumers can do, how to spot the real stuff, and why supporting local beekeepers matters more than ever.Sign up for our newsletter!

In this episode, Jess educates Max on the billion dollar, illicit food fraud industry.

We cover how the Italian Mafia gained legitimate enterprises through American subsidies post WWII, how they strengthened their positions through vertical integration, and how they (among other criminal enterprises) figured out how to sell fake olive oil, cheeses, and wines to not only Europe, but the world at large.

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It’s spooky season, and Farms and Frontlines is diving into the surprising history behind trick-or-treating.

Max and Jessica trace the tradition all the way back to the Celtic festival of Samhain, when families left food to appease wandering spirits, and through the Catholic Church’s “soul cakes” that children collected while praying for the dead. From medieval souling to Scottish and Irish “guising,” the practice eventually crossed the Atlantic, where American suburbs, postwar candy companies, and even Peanuts comics turned it into the Halloween we know today.

Along the way, Max and Jess uncover why soul cakes might have been the original pumpkin spice, how candy corn started life as “chicken feed,” and why the end of World War II’s sugar rationing was the real turning point for Halloween candy. Expect stories of VHS tapes in trick-or-treat bags, pranks gone wrong during the Great Depression, and the surprising link between peanut butter, Hershey, and Reese’s Cups.

From ancient bonfires to candy capitalism, this episode explores how food and ritual shaped one of the most beloved holidays in America—and why every Kit Kat still has an ancestor in a little cake baked for the souls of the dead.

After a summer break, Farms and Frontlines returns with a deep dive into one of the most fascinating intersections of agriculture and Cold War politics: the 1972 Wheat Deal, better known as The Great Grain Robbery. Jess shares her move from West Point to the National Intelligence University, and together we unpack how a secret U.S.–Soviet grain deal reshaped global food markets, sparked inflation at home, and forever tied the Farm Bill to both foreign policy and domestic food programs. From 300 billion loaves of bread to Cold War soft power, this episode explores how American agriculture became a tool of diplomacy, strategy, and controversy.⁠Sign up for our newsletter!