Page 20 - CARIBE TOURIST GUIDE

Historia del Caribe
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In the banana harvest, human energy and motive power interacted with animal and railroad power. These interactions resulted in the development of planting and harvesting methods that contributed to the socio-historical construction of banana quality in Costa Rica.
The loading of bananas on the railroad to the port was made possible by the existence of specialized workers, exploited by the transnational company, and by the transformation of nature that made it possible to link the farms, the railroad, the port and the market through the construction of roads and railroads. In sociocultural terms, interethnic relations were part of daily life and conflict in the region. The use of refrigeration systems on ships made it possible to load green fruit and control the ripening process until the products reached the U.S. market, which guaranteed a stable fruit supply (Bourgois, 1994; Harpelle, 2001; Gudmunson and Wolfe, 2010; Senior, 2011; Rosario, 2015).
In the context of the main productive activities in the Atlantic-Caribbean region of Costa Rica, workers had to adapt themselves to productive activities that could find a market, such as the cultivation and export of cocoa.
In the perspective of the photographs, one can notice the presence of urban equipment and services in the city of Limón, capital of the province of the same name, an agritown that grew due to banana plantations and became the center of power of the banana enclave, with a direct line to Boston, where the headquarters of the United Fruit Company was located.
Cocoa in the Costa Rican Caribbean
Along with coffee and bananas, cocoa is one of Costa Rica’s most important agricultural export products, with a significant impact on the country’s economy, culture and national identity. For the country’s native peoples, cocoa functioned as a currency through the commercial value of the bean. It allowed our
ancestors to buy products – or rather, to exchange products for cocoa. It was considered to be the drink of the gods.
Cocoa helped to shape Costa Rican culture, making an indelible mark on the collective imagination as the socioeconomic thread between the ancestral indigenous culture and post-Columbian history. It has appeared cyclically at key moments, normally associated with the Caribbean area and its predominant cultures: indigenous and Caribbean, of which have made an indisputable contribution to the national culture.
For millennia, hundreds of generations have survived in the shade of the cocoa tree, children have sucked its seeds to clean them secretly from their parents, young people have waited for the sun each day to dry them to obtain Costa Rica’s first “golden bean”, cocoa.
The Caribbean has many of the optimal characteristics for the successful cultivation of high-quality cocoa, in terms of acidity, humidity and composition. In this sense, the Talamanca area, in the south Caribbean, has combined ecotourism and agrotourism in indigenous and non-indigenous farming communities that involve the production of organic cocoa and bananas as an opportunity for tourists to find out about and enjoy the delicious product, both as a natural fruit and in chocolates and other related products made with cocoa.
More information: costadelchocolate.com
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