Miguel Ángel Asturias

Viento fuerte is the novel that opens the banana trilogy, along with El Papa verde and Los ojos de los enterrados. The Guatemalan economy was subjected to the monoculture of bananas for decades. This work is both an homage to the pioneers and a denunciation of the inhumane and cruel capitalism that solidified corruption in all spheres of political power.

Miguel Ángel Asturias uses the voice of the rural mestizo, the new indigenous person, who will be the new man of the revolution, alienated by the dishonest practices of Tropical Bananera S.A. and its allies. This new indigenous person, driven from their lands, victimized, seeking subsistence in the unhealthy heat of the coast, ended up trapped by the monopoly, enslaved, consumptive, syphilitic, alcoholic, with a soul as altered as the landscape. In parallel, we meet the Americans, allied with the corrupt oligarchy, isolated in their bungalows, running the company from their northern palaces, all narrated with a realism that is sometimes Frank Norris and sometimes Scott Fitzgerald, showing us the distant green empire of money, the world of those who benefit from the fruits of the land without working it. The offered solution is the sacrifice of the revolution. Fed up, Hermenegildo Puac sacrifices himself for liberation, so that Chamá Rito Perraj, who transcends time, can invoke the mythical force of nature in a liturgy that is both a Mayan mural and a socialist banner. The apocalyptic destruction caused by the revolutionary hurricane is also a return to balance.