The Fanjul brothers
By Varela
Some years ago, interviewed by Vanity Fair, the Fanjul brothers, big businessmen, took advantage of the opportunity to justify the way in which they buy governments.
They said they came to the United States after learning a hard lesson. “We decided to get involved in politics because we didn’t want to go through the same thing that happened to us in Cuba, where, by not interfering in Batista’s politics, we had a very bad time.”
And the Fanjul brothers know how to do business.
They support, with rivers of money, the leading candidates of both American parties. Alfonso supports the Democrats; Pepe, the Republicans.
Then the Fanjul brothers do whatever they want to the flora, the fauna and the human race in Florida.
They destroy the Everglades by extending the cane fields all the way into the swamp. The fertilizer they spread in the plantations consumes the oxygen in water, killing the aquatic life.
Conservationists complain, but the authorities ignore the crime because the Fanjul brothers – Florida’s cane kings and purveyors of two of every three teaspoons of sugar Americans consume – use their million-dollar contributions to Washington to buy the law and impose it as they see fit, including the way they exploit their workers.
I just read in the press one of their latest abuses: the vexation and humiliation meted to Ángel Pérez, a Cuban-American who, for 15 years, worked in one of the Fanjul brothers’ sugar mills. He had been considered a model employee, until he was elected as a union representative and started to file complaints about his fellow workers’ conditions.
He was expelled from the mill in the presence of a sheriff. Since he went to work in a company car, he was left without a vehicle, 50 miles from his home.
But the rottenness of the Fanjul brothers is not limited to the United States. It extends to the Dominican Republic, where, in the mid-1980s, they bought cane fields and mills because, according to them, it was “the place most similar to our much-beloved Cuba.”
And on that island, so much like the Fanjuls’ much-beloved island, Christian Pablo, half of whose 71 years was spent cutting cane for the Fanjul brothers, is immobilized on his bed in the Central Romana workers’ barracks without medical care.
Christian had a thrombosis that paralyzed half his body. He knows he was born in Haiti, whence he came for a harvest and never again returned. He is illiterate, both in Creole and Spanish. He signed with an X the form the mill handed him to record how much cane he cut and how much he was paid for every ton. He was always satisfied with his salary. Never complained. His masters were so powerful that they owned even the stones on the road.
Pay attention here: the Fanjul brothers record their properties, their earnings, their donations and their businesses but don’t keep track of the migrants they import to cut cane, so Christian does not collect a pension. He lives from the charity of his barracks’ neighbors, cane cutters, like him.
Cane cutters are paid on an output basis. An average of 90 pesos (US$2.46) for every ton of cane cut. A good machetero, young, strong and healthy, can cut up to four tons a day (US$9.84). But then come the withholdings.
Wages are withheld for a “medical insurance” the cutters don’t have. For water they don’t get while cutting on the fields. For light they don’t have in their barracks. For the machete, the boots and the gloves. Even for their consumption of the sugar they buy with the little money they make cutting cane, sunup to sundown.
There are neither papers nor contracts. The Jamaican and Haitian macheteros sign nothing. Their only survival system consists of being careful and not having an accident, not chopping a finger or slicing the tendons in one hand. Because if they don’t work, they don’t eat.
Of course, because they’re good businessmen, the Fanjul brothers use those migrants to increase the production in their cane fields, both in the Dominican Republic and Florida.
But something went wrong in Florida when they brought thousands of Jamaicans (on the sly) to work under subhuman conditions.
Alternative publications, such as The Miami New Times, accused the Fanjuls’ company, Florida Crystals, and denounced “the slavery of the sugar barons in Florida.”
In November 1986 there was a scandal when about 500 Jamaicans in a site known as Vietnam went on strike to protest against the mistreatment.
The Fanjuls called the police and special agents carrying guns shoved the Jamaicans into buses and deported them.
The incident riled up labor unions, labor lawyers and human rights organizations, and was turned into a movie script by actress Jodie Foster, who sold the rights to Robert DeNiro’s production company, Tribeca Films.
Foster herself directed the movie and played the role of the Jamaicans’ defense lawyer (in reality, they were defended by attorney Edward Tuddenham). DeNiro played Alfonso Fanjul.
The movie was titled “Sugarland” and was distributed by Universal. But the Fanjul brothers’ money and influence kept it from being shown (they pressured or paid the movie houses) and the film was shelved in 2007.
In other words, a movie about a real social drama, featuring two Oscar-winning stars (Foster and DeNiro), was not shown in this country because the Fanjul brothers, who supposedly left Cuba because of a lack of freedom, blocked its distribution.
On the other hand, the administration of Bush the Jerk returned the financial favors the Fanjuls extended to his 2000 campaign in Florida and in 2002 confirmed a continuation of the subsidies the government extends to them as “American sugar farmers,” for the purpose of putting a financial choke hold on Cuban exports.
A 1996 attempt to eliminate that subsidy was voted down and the Congressmen who opposed the bill received $11,000 in donations from the domestic sugar industry.
The Fanjuls receive $65 million a year from the U.S. Government. In the Dominican Republic, they are lords and masters. A minister who challenged their abuses on the cane fields, the Spanish missionary Christopher Hartley Sartorius, has his passport seized and was expelled from the country, back to Spain.
Today, the brothers control 50 percent of sugar production in Florida, where they own 728 square kilometers of cane fields, under the name Florida Crystals. They’re worth more than $1 billion.
The Fanjuls also were investors and members of the board of directors of Miami’s Southeast Bank until it was shut down by the FDIC in 1991. And in 1995 they folded FAIC Securities while the company was being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for violation of federal regulations.
Raised in Havana’s exclusive aristocracy, Alfonso and Pepe Fanjul lived in the Vedado section, 17th Street between D and E, in a two-floor mansion with neoclassical balconies, Louis XV-type rooms, Sèvres statues, Chinese kiosks, paintings by Sorolla, Goya, Murillo, Caravaggio, Boucher and Lebrun. The building was expropriated by the Revolution and today is the National Museum of Decorative Arts.
In the golden age of the 1950s, the Fanjul-Gómez Mena family hosted the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, played golf with Lowell Guinness and took Errol Flynn on yacht trips.
Meanwhile, Cuban cane cutters suffered the same indignities seen today in Florida and the Dominican Republic: exploitation, abuse, illiteracy, lack of medical care and eviction.
In their world of Caribbean glamour, the Fanjul brothers were unaware of that hell – until Fidel arrived.
In 1959, bearded men dressed in olive green entered the Fanjul mansion. At the time, Alfonso was 23 and had just graduated from Fordham University in New York City. His brother, Pepe, was 14.
Castro’s envoys summoned the entire family, put aside their guns and spread on the table maps that showed the family’s properties – cane fields, mills, workers’ barracks, mansions, a port. And they told them: “From this day on, all this belongs to the people. All of it!”
There was no negotiation.
