Minor Cooper Keith built railroads across Costa Rica and the wider region in the late 1800s, financing the lines partly by planting bananas along the tracks, a sideline that grew into the export empire behind companies like United Fruit. The film traces how a man who started as a railway contractor ended up reshaping entire national economies, striking land deals and monopoly concessions with governments desperate for infrastructure, and leaving behind the pattern of foreign-controlled agriculture that later critics would label the banana republic. Historians walk through Keith's rise from labor disputes and tropical disease outbreaks that killed thousands of his workers, to his marriage into Costa Rican political circles, to the vast fruit and rail conglomerate that outlasted him by decades. The documentary weighs his own account of bringing progress and jobs against the long record of exploitation, debt bondage, and political interference that followed his companies through Central America, letting the archival record and expert testimony argue both sides of a genuinely contested legacy.