The Duke and Duchess of Londres
Merle & Alexander today
by Steve Huffstutlar
In 1984, I was assigned to work in the dusty, smelly, broken down Pacific banana port of Quepos, which seemed to me then to be the veritable armpit of Costa Rica — it was far from being the shiny tourist paradise it is today. That year, it was my good fortune to be recruited to organize the first oil palm production cooperative in Costa Rica, thus ending the United Fruit Company/Chiquita Banana monopoly and making plantation workers into land owners.
Quepos had been in a gentle downward transition since the 1940’s, when the United Fruit Company had given up farming bananas after the Panama banana disease had somehow followed them from Limon. Oil palm took the place of the bananas, but was much less profitable and employed many fewer people. The company railroad tracks were torn out in 1970 and the first vehicle road to the outside world was built in its place.