Boris Yeltsin's visit to a suburban Houston supermarket in 1989 (2016)

Here is one about striking workers masacred: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Massacre

Or there is this Guatemalan coup d’état which was lobbied for by United Fruit Company: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27éta...

So, yes. I think it might just happen that buying banana from somewhere keeps them poor. These are so well known cases that I somewhat suspect you asked the question as a softball.

This propaganda technique is called reverse cargo cult. They don't try to directly refute the facts on the ground. They just claim that clever people realize it's all an illusion. It's devastatingly effective. No one wants to be on the wrong side of a sneer. https://hanshowe.org/2017/02/04/trump-and-the-reverse-cargo-...

"In a regular cargo cult, you have people who see an airstrip, and the cargo drops, so they build one out of straw, hoping for the same outcome. They don’t know the difference between a straw airstrip and a real one, they just want the cargo.

In a reverse cargo cult, you have people who see an airstrip, and the cargo drops, so they build one out of straw. But there’s a twist:

When they build the straw airstrip, it isn’t because they are hoping for the same outcome. They know the difference, and know that because their airstrip is made of straw, it certainly won’t yield any cargo, but it serves another purpose. They don’t lie to the rubes and tell them that an airstrip made of straw will bring them cargo. That’s an easy lie to dismantle. Instead, what they do is make it clear that the airstrip is made of straw, and doesn’t work, but then tell you that the other guy’s airstrip doesn’t work either. They tell you that no airstrips yield cargo. The whole idea of cargo is a lie, and those fools, with their fancy airstrip made out of wood, concrete, and metal is just as wasteful and silly as one made of straw.

1980s Soviets knew that their government was lying to them about the strength and power of their society, the Communist Party couldn’t hide all of the dysfunctions people saw on a daily basis. This didn’t stop the Soviet leadership from lying. Instead, they just accused the West of being equally deceptive. “Sure, things might be bad here, but they are just as bad in America, and in America people are actually foolish enough to believe in the lie! Not like you, clever people. You get it. You know it is a lie."

I see parallels to this now all the time - in conspiracy believers, and people from the Midwest who take it as common knowledge that life in California is a complete hellscape right now, because their preferred media sources tell them so every day.

The Soviet Union collapsed because the Party lost control of the country and the tensions and outright conflicts that previously prevented any challenge to its power tore up the country. It was conflicts between the nationalities, competition between bureaucrats of different levels over resources, the young Komsomol chiefs against the old gerontocrats, Moscow against the Russian regions, the Soviet Army against the KGB, the religious against the state atheism, innumerable other conflicts, with probably the ethnic/national conflicts having the most intensity. The USSR found out it couldn't control its own population and that is why it retreated from Eastern European countries as well.

The party lost control because of glasnost and perestroika which unleashed all the contradictions and conflict at once, which further caused chaos. It is no accident that the Communist party got itself banned in both Russia and Ukraine. In comparison China didn't try glasnost and did incremental and initially isolated economic reforms, with agriculture still being restricted to family farms to this day.

The USA didn't win the Cold War or cause the USSRs collapse, most of the time the policy was containment or even reapproachment, not rollback.

My college++ GF's father worked at as a CxO of an international company, spoke Russian, traveled there multiple times, and had a lot of friends & acquaintances in the diplomatic services.

In the early 1980s, he told us about one of his diplomatic friends hosting some Russian dignitaries for a few weeks. Their consistent attitude about everything was "of course, we have this also in Russia", along with the general assumption that everything was either staged or in a 'walled garden' for the rich and/or powerful. Then, late in the trip, she accompanied them on a shopping trip to one of the new-ish (at the time) large-format supermarkets. The visitor was literally in tears, surrounded by the acres of plenty. It didn't matter whether it was just for the rich or not — it was so far beyond her experience that she couldn't hold it together.

Similarly, another incident pointed out by a Russian expert [0]: when communist authorities in (IIRC) Bulgaria tried to show "Car Wash" redubbed as a racial morality play about capitalism and all anyone noticed that even the poorest people in LA had so many cars that we had machines to wash them.

They may have a lot of good information, but it is not exhaustive. And remember, everyone examines the information they receive through the lens of their own experience and their own ego. Those growing up behind the Iron Curtain both had never experienced any kind of luxury that was not walled off only for the ruling class, and also had a desire to defend their own pride in their homeland. So, they wouldn't necessarily understand the importance or utter ubiquity of something like large supermarkets before seeing it in person and in live context.

[0] https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1611418480183492613

What would happen if there was no market for those bananas?