Patrick Leigh Fermor, "The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands"

     "The local manager, a relation of Raoul's, was a friend of mine. 'It's wonderful stuff,' he said. 'The locals adore it. It keeps them off the rum.' It's true. An increasing number of the inhabitants of Fort-de-France circulate the capital in a permanent state of stone-cold sobriety, their insides awash with this strange brown liquid. The propaganda drive of this firm has been so intensive and so ruthlessly efficient in its execution, that never for a second are the words Coca-Cola out of one's sight. It is on a scale that nobody who has not crossed the Atlantic can hope to grasp. They are printed on almost everything you touch. Everywhere the beaming heroines of these giant advertisements smirk and simper and leer. It becomes the air you breathe, a way of life, an entire civilization- the Coca-Cola age, yoke fellow of the age of the Atomic Bomb.
     The bottles, when they are emptied, are sent back to be refilled, but the tin can capsules that seal them are littered everywhere. They clatter against your shoes in the dust and pile up in rusty drifts in the gutters. Bit by bit they will form a metal humus all over the western hemisphere, so that centuries after the bomb has done its work and made way, perhaps for a nobler detritus, archaeologists will be able to put a date to our buried remains with the help of this stratum of small round lids."
-Patrick Leigh Fermor, "The Traveler's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands," 1950