Pop Culture
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November/December 1996
By Steven Garibaldi, Probable Cause
If you want the Real Thing, you have to go to Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru. Each country's product is slightly different, but each has the same bite, the well-remembered clean cane sugar sting. In Mexico, a 16-ounce Coke is 650 to 800 pesos (about 17 cents), but the deposit on the bottle is 1,000 pesos. Children and old men roam tourist resorts, walk along the beach, beg at the back of restaurants, and rifle through garbage cans to collect bottles for deposit. Bring back a found bottle, trade it in for a Coke, drink it, return that one too--bingo, you've made ten cents. Ten cents and a Coke. A good profit in a poor country. A little container of capitalism.
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In Mexico, they still use those ancient bottles, and recycle them until the labels are so faint they cannot be read anymore, not that it matters. The shape is unmistakable. In dusty villages in Guatemala and Nicaragua, in concrete cities and tarpaper shacks, kids sip Coke and dream. That red and white emblem is the flag of revolution, a Hollywood movie in your hand. I am sure that children all over the world obtain their first glimpse of infinity watching the ringing bottles of Coca-Cola piled two men high on a truck. The Coca-Cola truck goes everywhere. When the last composted dinosaur and Mesozoic swamp have been sucked from this dry earth, small brown men will emerge and convert their Fords to run on stockpiles of carbonated drink.
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