One island. Two occupations. One Senate committee that looked at what the United States military had been doing in the Caribbean — and then filed the paperwork and moved on.

In this episode, we're in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The Marines landed in Haiti in 1915. The Dominican Republic had already been under U.S. financial administration since 1907. By 1916, the United States was running military occupations of both countries simultaneously, using the same personnel, the same institutional structures, and the same justificatory language: order, stability, protection of American interests.

What it lacked was an exit plan.

We follow the money that arrived before the Marines, the forced labor system that turned a Haitian community tradition into a counterinsurgency tool, the resistance fighter who became a martyr when the photograph meant to end his movement made him immortal, and the 1921 Senate hearings that produced 1,800 pages of sworn testimony about what the occupations actually looked like — and changed almost nothing.

Cuba had a constitutional clause. Panama had a canal zone. Honduras had a concession system. Haiti and the Dominican Republic had the occupations themselves. And when the occupations ended, they left behind the tools of indirect control.

Next exit: Nicaragua.

For full source citations, a written recap, and everything else from the Banana Wars series, visit us at farmsandfrontlines.substack.com

In 1904, a writer on the run from embezzlement charges coined a phrase that would outlast every government he was describing. This week, Max and Jess dig into Honduras, the country O. Henry was watching when he coined the term "Banana Republic".

The story of how three American fruit companies turned a nation's north coast into a private empire: buying land with railroad promises, installing presidents with mercenary armies, and writing internal memos about how keeping the country unstable was good for business.

We cover the formation of the United Fruit Company, the wildly improbable coup of 1911 (a Russian-born banana trader, a mercenary named Lee Christmas, and a gangster named Machine Gun Maloney), what "dollar diplomacy" actually looked like on the ground, and why Honduras had more railroad track per capita than almost any country in Central America, with none of it connecting to the capital.

We also end somewhere surprising: 1954, when 100,000 banana workers shut it all down.Sign up for our newsletter! Get recaps, photos, sources, and additional fun facts relating to our latest episodes. For instance, did you know Tulane University Presidents reside in Sam the Banana Man's old mansion?

American farmers were already in crisis before the first bomb fell. In this special episode, host Max Terzano lays out the facts on what federal agricultural programs have been cut since January 2025, what those programs did, and what their loss means for the people growing our food, now compounded by the U.S. war with Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

We cover the gutting of the USDA workforce, the freezing of conservation contracts that left farmers holding unpaid bills, the collapse of beginning farmer training programs, and the research funding cuts hitting land-grant universities. Then we turn to the war: why fertilizer prices are up 50%, why diesel costs more even though the U.S. doesn't ship oil through the Strait, and why farmers are already shifting millions of acres away from corn.

We also put 2026 in historical context, comparing this crisis to the 2022 Black Sea disruption that followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and explaining why economists say this one may be harder to resolve. The revenue offset that softened the blow for farmers in 2022 doesn't exist this time.

All claims are sourced. Sources are linked in the show notes.

Farms & Frontlines covers the history, politics, and power behind global food systems.

Find us at farmsandfrontlines.substack.com or write to farmsandfrontlines@gmail.com.

The Panama Canal didn't begin with construction. It began with a clause in an 1846 treaty granting the United States the right to land troops on the Isthmus whenever it saw fit. Over the next five decades, Washington would invoke that clause at least 13 times. By 1903, the Roosevelt Corollary had given the U.S. a self-declared mandate to intervene anywhere in Latin America where order was in question, and when Colombia's Senate rejected the canal treaty, order was very much in question.

In Part 2 of our Banana Wars series, Max and Jess trace the gunboat diplomacy that delivered Panamanian independence on Washington's timeline, the backroom dealing of a French engineer with $40 million riding on the outcome, and the racial labor hierarchy that determined who built the canal, who survived it, and whose deaths were carefully recorded and whose weren't.

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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!