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 to her name.32
Selling a few household effects, Noboa’s mother scraped together passage for her offspring and herself back to Guayaquil, where one of her husband’s elderly relatives provided modest quarters on the city’s outskirts. Less than four months after losing her husband, Zoila Naranjo de Noboa delivered her last child and only daughter. She also sold one of her three gold coins and used the proceeds to start a small business, thereby providing an early tutorial in entrepreneurship to her sons. The business consisted of selling milk by the serving throughout Guayaquil and required a modest investment in containers, purchases from neighboring dairies, and recruitment of local boys to serve as a sales force. Any merchandise left at the end of the day was mixed with eggs and rum to make rompope, which was hawked along with rolls made from wheat and yucca flour.33
Out of a desire to help support his family, Noboa decided at eleven to leave school after just three years with the Salesian Fathers. “One day,” he vowed as he presented his mother with the first sucres he had earned, “I will be a rich man and will bring you lots of presents.” After starting out selling magazines on the streets of Guayaquil and even on trains running up to Quito, Noboa consistently engaged in a diverse array of ventures. One was a sidewalk stand, named “Basantes” after its former proprietor, where he and a partner named Modesto Rivadeneira shined shoes and sold magazines and sundry items. The two boys figured out that premium prices could be charged after six in the evening, when other street vendors went home.34 Learning the value of long hours on the job, they each cleared 100 sucres (equivalent to $225 today) a month at a time when the prevailing daily wage for adult laborers was little more than one sucre. Noboa also sold cloths for polishing metal, which led to his job at the Sociedad General as well as lifelong business associations and personal friendships with Juan F. and Juan X. Marcos.35
Fully appreciative of Noboa’s talents and capabilities, the Marcoses were wise enough to give him free rein. For example, Noboa was allowed to continue running his own businesses, including a small office in central Guayaquil where he traded currency and sold souvenirs and Parker Pens starting in 1933. Six months after joining the bank, the former street vendor asked the younger Marcos for a loan of 3,000 sucres ($6,750 in today’s money), promising “you’ll have your money back in three months and a profit of 3,000 sucres.” The loan was made and Noboa delivered on his promise in full. He also asked for a follow-up loan under the same terms. When a third loan was requested—for 10,000 sucres ($22,500)—Marcos could no longer contain his curiosity and asked what was being done with the money. Only then did he find out that the thirteen-year-old had been trading in the auction room of the customs house.36
Just as the proprietors of the Sociedad General did not hold Noboa back from buying and selling on his own, the budding entrepreneur was not prevented from associating with other businessmen. His personal office was close to the Banco La Previsora, a leading financial institution managed by Victor Emilio Estrada. “This young man is worth his weight in gold,” concluded the banker, who not only befriended the teenager but offered him a job as assistant manager. Noboa did not accept the position, although he became Estrada’s partner in a company engaged in importing and in representing foreign firms, including Chrysler and Coca Cola. Before he turned eighteen, Noboa was managing the company, in which he held a one-third equity stake. Renamed Comandato S.A. after a few years, it is still in business.37
Aside from being a superb commercial operator in his own right, Noboa benefited substantially from his partnerships. In this, he had something in common with entrepreneurs who had preceded him in the banana business. Zemurray, for example, got an early boost thanks to associations with other merchants in Mobile as well as financial backing from United Fruit. By the same token, Latin American entrepreneurs who followed Noboa flourished in large part because of their partnerships. A case in point was Vives, who did well as an exporter by working with Francisco Dávila—someone who provided “a touch of sophistication” reflecting his undergraduate studies in France and the MBA he had earned at Stanford University.38
The Right place, the Right Entrepreneurs
In a book about the Ecuadorian operations of United Fruit, Steve Striffler has little to say about the costa’s capitalists, other than to chronicle their disputes with campesinos and workers. He draws no distinctions between commercial farmers, some of whom operate on a large scale while others do not, and individuals engaged in overseas marketing and other non-agricultural pursuits. Nor is he concerned with entrepreneurial innovation and the various forms it takes. His commentary on capitalists largely echoes the convictions of a rural laborer named Patricio, whom Striffler quotes often. Firmly maintaining that workers such as he “produce the bananas,” Patricio complains that farm owners, local intermediaries, and multinationals do little or nothing for the money coming their way.39
Alberto Acosta, author of a widely read economic history of Ecuador, does not endorse the view that capitalists merely appropriate the wealth their employees are solely responsible for creating, as adherents of
