Louisiana
Who were the 700 people from New Orleans who helped bring bananas to the U.S.?
Bananas are everywhere — school cafeterias, $9 smoothies, perhaps even rotting on your kitchen counter. They’re a cheap source of fiber and potassium, and it’s no wonder they’re Walmart’s best selling product.
Bella Gamboa, currently a med student in Baltimore, has been casually interested in the history of the banana since high school.
“They are such an omnipresent fruit in the U.S.,” she said. “But the way that we eat them here is also a very particular thing.”
The most ubiquitous variety of banana in the U.S., the Cavendish banana, is a relatively recent invention. It wasn’t popularized until the 1950s, and in much of the world, they still eat other, very different varieties of the fruit which aren’t necessarily yellow, long or skinny.
Recently, Gamboa was listening to an episode of NPR’s Throughline from 2020, “There Will Be Bananas,” which details the history of the banana in the States. The episode follows Minor Cooper Keith, a businessman who ruthlessly recruited people to lay railroads in Costa Rica in the early 1870s.
He eventually used the railroad to export bananas to the U.S., a business venture that eventually became the United Fruit Company, but before completion, most of the workers he recruited died or ran away once they knew how bad the conditions were. The railroads are the result of thousands of deaths. Even Keith’s own brothers lost their lives working on the project.
A few years into the endeavor, Keith went to New Orleans to recruit more workers, allegedly from prisons.
“He basically calls for volunteers,” said Dan Koeppel, author of the book “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World,” on the podcast. “And he says, anybody who volunteers — helps me build my railroad to completion — is going to get a pardon. Seven hundred prisoners volunteer. But only 25 prisoners survive to get their pardons — 25 out of 700.”
Looking into prisoners’ stories
“I was really intrigued by this detail,” said Gamboa.
The detail was presented as an aside in the larger story about bananas, but to Gamboa, the historic footnote was “part of this broader trend that’s often sort of at the margins.” The story of bananas, and many other things for that matter, seem to be a story about incarcerated labor.
“Who were these prisoners? What were their stories/fates?” Gamboa asked Curious Louisiana. “How does Louisiana unexpectedly fit into the story of bananas as an American staple food?”
Let’s start with Koeppel. He’s far from the first to repeat this statistic. Many contemporary books and articles about the history of bananas repeat a similar line with minimal variation: “700 prisoners” arrived in Costa Rica to work on the railroads, and only 25 survived. But these sources provide scant details regarding these people or what actually happened to them. Through library archives, old newspaper clippings and interviews with both Koeppel and a historian, Curious Louisiana looked into it.
They weren’t prisoners. At least, not all of them.
According to Eric Seiferth, curator/historian and lead on the current exhibition at The Historic New Orleans Collection titled “Captive State: Louisiana and the Making of Mass Incarceration,” there’s no known original source information documenting 700 prisoners leaving New Orleans for Costa Rica. If that did happen, someone should have definitely noticed.
“Seven hundred people would be more people than there were spaces to incarcerate in New Orleans,” he said. He doesn’t have exact numbers for the Orleans Parish Prison at the time, but he said when its replacement was built in 1930, the capacity was 400 beds. “It’s hard for me to believe that there were so many people that they had 700 people in the Orleans Parish Prison, when 100 years later, the jail had half that capacity.”
Plus, Seiferth said, the story doesn’t really cohere with incarcerated labor practices or the pardon system at the time. According to him, the early 1870s lines up with the convict lease era in Louisiana where rights to contract out that labor were owned by one guy: Samuel James.
“The city would have no incentive to send away prisoners because they relied on them for their urban workforce,” he said. “That’s who did everything in the city, who took care of the streets and cleaned the markets and cleaned the buildings. All that work was done by people in the workhouses and in the police jails and things like that.”
Plus, Keith also wouldn’t have the authority to grant pardons to anyone — that was and still is under the discretion of the governor.
‘It will be repeated again’
Here’s what we do know: in the 1870s, Minor Cooper Keith was strapped for labor while building the railroad, and he, or someone he was affiliated with, went to New Orleans to do some recruiting.
According to “Empire of Green and Gold,” a book written by Charles Morrow Wilson, a former publicist for the United Fruit Company, Keith’s uncle, Henry Meiggs placed an ad in New Orleans’ newspapers enticing people with the promise of steady work and $1/day. The book “Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World” by Peter Chapman tells a similar story, adding that the wages attracted “many occupants of the city’s jail.”
But there are no citations for where these books got that information from, and a library associate at the New Orleans Public Library was unable to turn up the advertisement or any advertisement placed by Meiggs. A search in the Times-Picayune archives yielded an 1872 ad recruiting people to work on the railroad in Costa Rica but for $.80 per day. It was not placed by Keith or his uncle.
Either way, people went. Probably because the promise of a job and pay were better than whatever their lives looked like at home. Working on the railroad was hard and dangerous. Most people didn’t make it back, and their stories seem to be lost to history.
New Orleans comes into play
As for how New Orleans fits into the larger story of bananas, that part of the question is much more straightforward — a matter purely of geography. According to Koeppel, it was key to bringing bananas into the U.S. because it was centrally located. The company that eventually merged with Keith’s venture to become the United Fruit Company was the Boston Fruit Company.
“That gives you an idea of where they were shipping bananas before: Boston, New York, Port of New Jersey,” said Koeppel. “That’s great for urban demand in the most populated parts of the country, but if you’re trying to get to Chicago, St. Louis, other Midwestern cities, then you need to be a little closer.”
New Orleans was that closer port to help distribute bananas beyond New England and to the rest of the U.S., and workers from New Orleans lost their lives laying the tracks that made exporting bananas from Costa Rica possible.
Today, incarcerated labor is still embedded in the nation’s supply chain.
“In prisons across Louisiana today,” Seiferth said, “everybody’s forced to labor, and they’re not really paid.”
GOP-led states sending hundreds of additional National Guard troops to DC
Three GOP governors have pledged to send hundreds more National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., to aid Trump’s federalization of the city.
Straight Arrow News
Louisiana National Guard soldiers have returned to Washington, D.C., on a second deployment as part of President Trump’s continued crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital.
Trump declared a crime emergency in Washington nine months ago to trigger deployments of states’ National Guard troops to the capital.
Republican Gov. Jeff Landry first sent a contingent of Louisiana soldiers to Washington in August 2025. Lt. Col. Noel Collins told USA Today Network on May 13 that all of those soldiers returned to Louisiana by the end of December.
Landry’s latest deployment of Louisiana soldiers includes about 125 who began assisting other soldiers and local police May 12.
Louisiana’s soldiers won’t make arrests, but they will patrol high-traffic areas while playing a supporting role for the D.C. National Guard and local police.
The White House has said its capital crime task force has made more than 12,000 arrests since August and seized thousands of illegal guns.
Greg Hilburn covers state politics for the USA TODAY Network of Louisiana. Follow him on Twitter @GregHilburn1.
BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) – A new report shows Louisiana students are making some of the biggest gains in the country, with state education leaders celebrating the progress.
The newest national report card now ranks Louisiana 32nd in the nation, a jump from 49th in 2019.
“Louisiana is no longer about Louisiana simply believes, but for K-12 education, Louisiana achieves,” said state Superintendent Dr. Cade Brumley.
The jump comes mainly from improved reading and math scores, making Louisiana the only state that has returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Gov. Jeff Landry said the achievement comes at an opportune time for the generation to capitalize on economic developments coming to the state.
“These young men and women are going to get an opportunity we have never had. These kids get to grow up in a new Louisiana at a time when they are getting the education they need,” Landry said.
Brumley said the focus is now on attendance, more tutoring, higher teacher pay, and job readiness.
“Tutoring for every kid to get a little extra help if they need it; differentiated pay so we can target pay in a very precise way to those teachers doing great work for kids; and in the elevation in career and technical education,” Brumley said.
While leaders are celebrating, Brumley said the real work is keeping that momentum.
“Louisiana doesn’t have to be last. Indeed, we can be number one. We will continue to see great results,” Brumley said.
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Louisiana
As Louisiana’s Senate election nears, carbon capture becomes a big issue. Here’s what to know.
In a campaign that has focused more on President Donald Trump than the issues, government regulation of carbon capture and sequestration has emerged as a key fault line in Saturday’s Senate primary.
State Treasurer John Fleming has made his forceful opposition to the new process a key driver of his campaign, saying it threatens to poison waterways and strip landowners of property rights.
That has made him the target of attack ads broadcast by two outside groups associated with Gov. Jeff Landry and financed at least in part by oil and gas companies that want to inject the carbon dioxide deep in underground wells.
Fleming has counterattacked by saying that U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow, who has Landry’s support, actually supports the industry because her fiancée, Kevin Ainsworth, is a major lobbyist for carbon capture and sequestration companies in Baton Rouge. Letlow has called that accusation “a low blow.”
Letlow has said she favors letting local communities decide whether to allow the process.
“If a project is not safe, if it’s not transparent and if it does not have community buy-in, it should not move forward,” she said in a radio debate on May 5.
But in a separate interview, Letlow refused to be pinned down on how a community would decide to give a green light.
U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy on Tuesday said he agrees with Fleming that oil and gas companies should not be able to exercise eminent domain to build pipelines and storage facilities without landowners’ approval.
Cassidy also said he supports the moratorium that Landry has imposed on new carbon capture and sequestration projects. Letlow also backs that moratorium.
Cassidy said allowing parish governments to block carbon capture and sequestration projects “is an acceptable option.”
Where the race stands
Fleming and Letlow are trying to unseat Cassidy this year in the Republican election campaign. Saturday is the primary, where the top two Republican finishers, if no one wins above 50%, advance to a runoff on June 27.
All three candidates are predicting they will win one of the two spots in the June 27 runoff. Polls indicate that Letlow has the best chance.
But political analysts note that the new semi-closed primary election system and recent seismic events – including a U.S. Supreme Court decision that nullified Louisiana’s congressional map and Landry then canceling the House elections – make prognosticating Saturday’s results a challenge.
Three Democrats are vying in their own primary to face the Republican Senate nominee in November. They are Nick Albares, a policy analyst in New Orleans; Gary Crockett, a business owner in New Orleans; and Jamie Davis, a soybean, cotton and corn farmer in northeast Louisiana.
Albares said on Tuesday that he sides with Fleming and Cassidy in not allowing companies to use eminent domain to build carbon capture and sequestration projects on private land.
Davis called for “binding consent from the people who live there, not a public comment period that gets ignored” before any injection wells are permitted.
Crockett said, “I’m totally against it.”
Trump dominates election
Trump has been a dominant topic in the campaign because each of the three Republicans is claiming to be the candidate best aligned with the president. Letlow has his endorsement.
The three Democrats have been scathing in their criticism of Trump.
In a weekly call with reporters Tuesday, Cassidy announced $150 million in additional federal money to build a replacement bridge on Interstate 10 over the Calcasieu River in Lake Charles.
In making the announcement, Cassidy slipped in a story about how he was riding on the ancient bridge with Trump in the presidential limousine nicknamed “the Beast” to an event in Hackberry in Cameron Parish in 2019. As they reached the top, Cassidy said, Trump wondered aloud, “Is this bridge going to hold us”?
Cassidy said the new bridge would be able to hold the Beast and is an example of how he delivers for Louisiana. He said the money came from the Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act, a President Joe Biden-initiative that he supported, unlike the rest of Louisiana’s Republican delegation.
Fleming, meanwhile, speaking to a Republican luncheon Tuesday in Baton Rouge, highlighted a nine-page referral to the Department of Justice by a nonprofit group that accuses Letlow of filing false campaign finance reports to the Federal Elections Commission.
The Coolidge Reagan Foundation alleged that the Letlow Victory Fund raised money for two months without reporting it and then tried to conceal this later.
The foundation said it has filed previous complaints against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.
“With the FEC, you have to be very careful with your paperwork,” Fleming told the crowd at the Ronald Reagan Newsmaker Luncheon.
Letlow’s campaign dismissed the allegation.
“Bill Cassidy voted to convict President Trump (on impeachment charges in 2021) and has spent over $10 million attacking Julia Letlow,” Letlow’s campaign said in a statement. “Now, in an attempt to distract from President Trump’s endorsement of Letlow, Cassidy’s allies are desperately trying to dress up routine FEC paperwork questions because they can’t defend Cassidy’s record. The Letlow campaign takes compliance seriously and has filed all required reports with the FEC.”
In recent days, Letlow has said that the defeat last week of five state senators opposed by Trump in Indiana bodes well for her campaign, since Trump wants to end Cassidy’s Senate career.
Outspent by Cassidy and Letlow, Fleming has said he is running a grassroots campaign. One example of that, he said in an interview, is that a majority of the members of the Republican State Central Committee have requested that the committee endorse him.
Derek Babcock, the party chair, didn’t respond to a text Tuesday asking how the party’s executive committee – which actually issues the endorsement – will respond.
Attack ads target Fleming
Landry has inserted himself into the campaign by raising money for two groups associated with him – the Accountability Project and MAGA Energy – to attack Fleming. Both groups are organized in a way that doesn’t require them to disclose their donors and are headed by two of his key campaign associates, Jay Connaughton and Jason Hebert.
Landry held an event at the Governor’s Mansion on April 20 with about 15 carbon capture and sequestration executives, said someone who attended the meeting but spoke on condition of anonymity. Landry warned the group that a Fleming victory would harm their industry. The executives then heard a pitch to raise $1.5 million to defeat Fleming, according to the source.
In a brief interview, Landry acknowledged holding the meeting but wouldn’t discuss it.
Fleming repeats his opposition to carbon capture and sequestration at every opportunity, telling the Reagan luncheon, “It’s just not good for Louisiana.”
In other appearances, Fleming has said the technology is unproven and dangerous, saying in a radio interview last month, “It’s stuffing toxic carbon dioxide in the ground and using your taxpayer money and stealing your land through private domain for profiteering.”
For a month, the Accountability Project and MAGA Energy have been attacking Fleming.
The Accountability Project has broadcast ads accusing Fleming of being a supporter of allowing illegal aliens across the Mexican border. Fleming called that a lie while speaking at the Reagan luncheon, saying he supports tough border restrictions.
MAGA Energy accuses Fleming of having voted for pro-carbon capture and sequestration bills while he served in the House. That, too, is a lie, Fleming told the Reagan crowd.
In a new line of attack, the Accountability Project is attempting to undermine a key part of Fleming’s pro-Trump biography by saying that Fleming never served as Trump’s deputy chief of staff during his final 10 months as president in first term.
In campaign appearances, Fleming has said his office was 10 steps from the Oval Office in the West Wing, and he told the Reagan luncheon that the accusation was “an absolute lie.”
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