In Guatemala, in the 40s and 50s, huge areas of land were owned by the United Fruit Company. They grew bananas there, to sell in the US. However, they didn’t want to grow too many or else it would drive down prices, and they didn’t want to let anyone else use the land or else they might compete with them, so they left huge areas of the land they owned fallow. This meant a lot of Guatemalans were left unemployed, because the land wasn’t being worked, and there were also food shortages in Guatemala because so much land was either being used to grow cash crops for export or being left empty on purpose. So, United Fruit was able to pay low wages and have terrible working conditions and the workers would still be desperate to get a job from them. United Fruit, as such an important part of the Guatemalan economy, also had a longstanding back-room deal with the government to intentionally undervalue their land holdings, so they didn’t have to pay so much land tax.

In 1950, the Guatemalan people elected Jacobo Árbenz, a social-democratic, moderate capitalist reformer. One of his first (and extremely popular) acts was a land reform bill, which forcibly purchased uncultivated land from various people and corporations, most notably United Fruit, with a kicker - the government only paid them the undervalued price they’d been using to avoid land tax!

In response, in 1954, the US government trained and armed five hundred right-wing Guatemalans, sent them into the country (while an aircraft carrier was parked offshore in case the Guatemalan military tried anything), deposed the government in a coup, and began a thirty-year reign of terror that resulted in tens of thousands of people being tortured, disappeared or murdered by roving death squads (armed and funded by the US and trained by Green Berets), especially against the native Maya populations of whom over a million became displaced refugees, while any left-wing guerilla groups in the countryside that tried to fight back were ruthlessly hunted with the full might of the US military-intelligence system.

There is no reform mild enough that it can be allowed to pass. Trying to solve the ‘riddle’ of capitalist democracy with a clever solution, like buying land for its undervalued price, doesn’t work - the correct solution to the riddle is to choke on your cleverness and die. US support for this brutality was motivated entirely in defense of the profits of a private company, and spanned ten presidential terms of both Republicans and Democrats - do you think the people of the US could have elected anyone who would stop it? Do you think these tools of oppression wouldn’t be turned inwards the very instant the US ruling class felt threatened? Do you think they haven’t already?

While the coup was happening, a certain doctor from Argentina happened to be staying in Guatemala, and watched the violence and subsequent crackdown unfold. That doctor was Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, and he would go on to fight alongside Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolution. They knew that reform wouldn’t work, and that only a total overthrow of the system by violence, followed by the establishment of a new state that could protect itself from imperial aggression, would be enough to ensure peace and justice for the people. And now, despite decades of crushing sanctions and constant plots, sabotage, propaganda and assassination attempts, Cuba has a higher life expectancy than the United States. Its revolution succeeded where reform obviously could not.