Fanuli’s call
“Those crazy Cubans,” they say on the other side of the Straits. Cubans with rifles in Dallas, Texas, as they appear in Oliver Stone’s “JFK.” Cuban plumbers inside the Watergate building, discovered by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their Washington Post reports.
Cubans in the Iran-contra affair working for Oliver North, against the will of the Senate. A Cuban president of Coca-Cola. Another one, president of an anti-Castro organization, shown with Ronald Reagan in a photograph made in Calle Ocho’s “La Carreta” on a May 20th. And now another one in the sex life of a president of the United States, amid a scandal of outrageous proportions.
It was all the result of random chance. On the afternoon of Feb. 19, 1996, William Jefferson Clinton’s private conversation with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern with whom he had all the sex in the world, even in the Oval Office toilet, was interrupted.
It was Presidents Day, and perhaps for that reason the former governor of Arkansas, almost 50, appeared regretful. According to Lewinsky, Clinton “no longer felt right about their intimate relationship, and he had to put a stop to it.” He hugged her but would not kiss her.
At 12:24 p.m., a phone call came in from a Florida plantation owner, according to Monica, someone named “Fanuli.” The president did not take the call immediately but returned it at 12:42 p.m., as she left his office. The conversation lasted 20 minutes, the records show. “An eternity in presidential time,” wrote Jeffrey Klein in Mother Jones magazine.
Prosecutor Kenneth Starr would use that and other testimony from Lewinsky, some of them quite risqué, in a famous report to be used in an impeachment process against the president. Unlike in the Nixon case, the effort did not succeed for several reasons. One, because the Americans had decided to judge him by his performance, not by the place where he introduced his prime muscle, despite the sustained “moral offensive” of the Republicans and the sludge that usually associates with them.
But Puritanism is an odd thing. As time went on, Lewinsky would say that their relations had been limited to oral sex — known commonly as “blow jobs” — a statement not unlike the one made by Clinton himself when discussing his encounters with marijuana in London. He had tried it once or twice, he admitted, never inhaled, and never again went down that Damascus road. “Being president is like running a cemetery,” he once said. “You’ve got a lot of people under you but nobody’s listening.”
By that time, several changes were occurring in the Fanjul brothers’ domain. The first was to coexist/deal with the provisions of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created by the federal government to protect human health and the environment.
That call from Alfy “Fanuli” was related to a proposal for a one-cent tax on sugar to finance a program to clean up the Everglades, declared in 1993 (and for the first time) an endangered World Heritage site. The idea had been put forward by Vice President Al Gore during a visit to the national park situated there. The message was simple: those who polluted the Everglades should pay for the cleanup.
If by now anyone has any doubts about the meaning of the word “power,” he need only consider that 20-minute telephone conversation between the president and the sugar baron, as Washington Post reporter Steven Pearlstein did: “The restoration program survived; the tax on sugar didn’t.”
The South Florida sugar enterprise had been built on an area of some 700,000 acres south of Lake Okeechobee. Twenty-seven percent of the Everglades had been drained so the production and the marketing could proceed apace, a fact very much in the memory of ecologists.
Before then, said one, the Everglades was “one single river of grass, 6,000 years old, extending for 160 kilometers from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay.”
At that moment, the Fanjul brothers owned about 12 percent of all the land in Palm Beach County, areas that the Corps of Engineers gradually stole from the wetlands. The Fanjul family had already polluted the wetlands with nitrogen- and phosphorus-rich fertilizers plus the waste from its prosperous and subsidized industry, along with some corporate actors involved up to their eyeballs in the production of sugar and other farm products.
One was a competitor and simultaneously an ally of the Fanjulian lobby, in and out of Congress: the U.S. Sugar Corp., which owns the largest sugar plantation in the world and furnishes about 42,000 tons a year to the domestic market, i.e., 10 percent of all the sweetness consumed by Americans every 12 months.
The second element was the new technology. In the 1990s, the Fanjuls mechanized cane-cutting. From that time on, there would be no more human cane cutters. In addition to not cutting as much and as well as the machines, human cutters generated a slew of problems and a lot of bad press. It was a win-win situation, notwithstanding the investment. More productivity, fewer labor costs.
The Fanjuls also ventured in cleaner agricultural methods and alternative energy. In 1994, they installed a biomass plant in Okeelanta, still the largest in the United States. It produces 140 megawatts of electricity. The mill uses some of that power for its own operations. And, indeed, it is clean and renewable energy.
“We’re not the only ones who have changed,” Pepe Fanjul told The New York Times. “Environmental awareness in every country has changed and developed, not only in the United States. We all change as time goes by.”
However, the phone call demonstrated something that’s not included in that statement: the eternal clash between corporate business and the environment. Al Gore’s tax would cost Florida growers millions of dollars, “Fanuli” told the president.
That thing about an endangered ecosystem and the 6,000-year-old river of grass was all right, but there was no need to exaggerate.
(From Cuba-L Analysis)
