Here Comes Miami! The Scramble for Cuba
February 04, 2014
Here Comes Miami!
The Scramble for Cuba
by ALAN FARAGO
Consider it done: in the United States, the figurative hurricane barriers against access to Cuba are opening. Given they have been clamped shut for half a century, there is a lag time between turning the screws and actuating the gates. Put it this way: the lubrication is done.
On Monday, the conservative Capitol Hill Cubans blog hoisted a warning as the Washington Post published, “Sugar Tycoon Eyes Sweet-Deal With Castro”. Pay attention wherever Big Sugar surfaces. Cafecito is not the currency of the realm in Florida: sugar is. And not just Florida. Half of American health care costs are tied to the ill effects of sucrose in its various forms.
In June 2012 the blog, Eye On Miami, noted the first visit of Alfie Fanjul in Havana. Alfie is one half of the Florida Crystals family, the billion dollar brand that dominates anything related to land use, water management, agricultural subsidies and pollution control in the Florida legislature, Congress, and the White House.
It was more than a curiosity to learn that by 2012 wealthy Cuban Americans had publicly crossed the Florida Straits, risking the antagonism of the right wing message machine in Miami.
That message machine — embodied by vitriolic anti-Castro, Spanish language AM radio – routinely enforced political orthodoxy in Florida’s most politically influential county, Miami-Dade. Instructions came from the top down, and at the top: money from Big Sugar. The booming shrink wrapped luggage and long lines of passengers en route from Miami to Havana defied the stigma of the embargo. In other words, a brisk business between Miami Cubans and families on the island had already started beneath the AM language rants. Notwithstanding old hard liners banging war drums, by 2012 the gold rush was gearing up and by the presence of at least one Fanjul brother — Alfie — in Havana, political cards were being played.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/04/the-scramble-for-cuba/
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Big Sugar
Big Sugar explores the dark history and modern power of the world's reigning sugar cartels.
Using dramatic reenactments, it reveals how sugar was at the heart of slavery in the West Indies in the 18th century, while showing how present-day consumers are slaves to a sugar-based diet.
Going undercover, Big Sugar witnesses the appalling working conditions on plantations in the Dominican Republic, where Haitian cane cutters live like slaves.
Workers who live on Central Romano, a Fanjul-owned plantation, go hungry while working 12-hour days to earn $2 (US).
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/big-sugar/
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Immediately after the coup against Hugo Chavez was overturned by the citizens of Venezuela, Gustavo Cisneros, Venezuelan media mogul withdrew to a resort, and met with George H. W. Bush in a retreat at the resort owned by the Fanjul brothers in the Dominican Republic.
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http://images.diariolibre.com/showimage.php?typeid=17&imageid=187105
Gustavo Cisneros, Pepe Fanjul, George H. W. Bush
To remind us all of the filthy loathing maintained and stoked by the U.S.-supported right-wing in Venezuela
for the elected President of Venezuela, who did NOT direct his military to fire directly into crowds of protesters,
unlike the US-supported monster, and beloved of the Venezuelan oligarchy, Carlos Andres Perez, El Caracazo massacre:
Dirtbags, nothing but.[/center]
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About The Suger Barons - From Wikipedia:
The Fanjul brothers -- Alfonso "Alfy", José "Pepe", Alexander, and Andres—are owners of Flo-Sun, Inc., a vast sugar and real estate conglomerate in the United States and Dominican Republic, comprising the subsidiaries Domino Sugar, Florida Crystals, as well as the airport and resorts surrounding La Romana in the Dominican Republic. As of 2008, the company owned 450,000 acres (1,800 km2) of property.
FanjulCorp's Flo-Sun company is frequently criticized as being the largest recipient of U.S. Government aid and heightened profit due to the protections levied in favor of U.S. sugar producers. It is widely known that sugar costs about two-three times as much in the U.S. as it does on the world market.
FanjulCorp benefits significantly (their net profits average an additional $50 million to $100 million per year due solely to the quota and break-even program). The Fanjul brothers were large shareholders and directors of Southeast Bank before its takeover and liquidation by the FDIC in 1991. In addition, they are the majority shareholders and directors of FAIC Securities, which was investigated by the S.E.C. for regulatory violations.
Their estimates fortune is over USD 500 Million according to the book “Tricks of an IRS Cheat and other scandals you should know about Uncle Sam” page 82, http://tinyurl.com/35kfy4r , other magazines refer to them as Billionaires(see article below).
Casa de Campo is a 7,000 acre (about 5 square miles!!) large private luxury residential resort near La Romana on the south east side of the Dominican Republic. Casa de Campo is like a country with in the country. They have their own security force (not local police), hospital, schools, cinema plus a mega marina with lots of shops, restaurants and a supermarket. This 2000 luxury villa area has restricted access to residents, tourists and high society people only. That means 90% of general darker complexion of the Dominican population cannot visit Casa de Campo and are denied access to the beaches and restaurants. (That policy probably fits well with the statements and life of Fanjuls private secretary for 35 years, Chloe Black, read article below). Just ask the Dominican working class living in area of La Romana if they can visit Casa de Campo? The answer is no, and they will not even try!
More:
http://www.fanjulbrothers.com/
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Fanjuls cash in while U.S. taxpayers foot $1.8 billion bill for destruction of the Everglades
Despite being behind every packet of Domino sugar in every diner in the country, the name “Fanjul” is little-known outside of Florida. Alfy and Pepe Fanjul run Flo-Sun, Inc., the mega-corporation that, alongside U.S. Sugar, dominates the American sugar industry and wields substantial political influence in Washington and around the country. Flo-Sun’s subsidiaries include Domino, Florida Crystals, C&H and Redpath Sugar, but the company’s legacy is its alleged stranglehold on sugar-industry policy in the United States. The Fanjuls’ sugar empire benefits from environmental efforts that give them a green image — as taxpayers foot the bill — and from federal subsidies that American consumers pay for both at the grocery store and on tax day.
Florida’s Everglades Forever Act of 1994 drives one of the major environmental cleanup efforts in the state. Everglades Forever implementation so far has cost the state of Florida $1.8 billion. Of that, Florida sugar companies have pledged to contribute $300 million in tax revenue. (The Fanjuls own 40 percent of Florida’s sugar industry, though no hard numbers exist on how much each company has offered to the effort.) Put another way, the industry that is almost entirely responsible for both the historical destruction of the Everglades and continual pollution of the ecosystem thanks to fertilizer runoff is footing less than 20 percent of the bill to clean up the mess.
Meanwhile, the far larger Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) is funded half by the federal government and half by the Florida state government. CERP was originally projected to cost $7.8 billion; official Florida state cost estimates have since ballooned to $13.5 billion, though federal projections put it at just under $20 billion.
The fact that CERP is designed to clean up the mess in the Everglades without special contributions from the industry that largely created it has led some to speculate that the Fanjuls’ political connections played some part in shaping the program. However, the closest thing to a documented connection between the family and the program is the fact that one of CERP’s principal architects was former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.); Flo-Sun was a major contributor to Graham’s campaigns. Flo-Sun also began sending family scion Jose Fanjul, Jr. to Washington as a lobbyist in the late ’90s, but he stopped lobbying on his family’s behalf in 2000, the same year that the CERP went into effect as part of the Water Resources Development Act.
The billions that have been spent and the billions that have yet to be spent are meant to reverse the massive ecological changes that came about when nearly 2 million acres of the Everglades were razed, predominately to make room for sugar development. The money is also used to cut down the concentration of phosphorus that ends up in Florida waterways after being dumped on fields of sugar cane. Phosphorus is a nonrenewable central element in the production of fertilizer and is already in short supply all over the world — it’s also one of the many contributors to record-high food prices.
More:
http://dominicanwatchdog.org/dominican_news/page-Fanjuls_cash_in_while_U.S._taxpayers_foot_%241.8_billion_bill_for_destruction_of_the_Everglades
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(PDF)
In the Kingdom of Big Sugar
Marie Brenner
VANITY FAIR, Febuary 2001
I met Edward Tuddenham in the spring of 1999. I flew to South Florida because I was interested in a complex public-interest case he has been working on for 10 years, representing 20,000 sugarcane harvesters, most of them Jamaicans, who used to work for Florida’s largest sugar companies, including Florida Crystals (whose parent company is Flo-Sun Inc.), U.S. Sugar, and the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative. The cane cutters are suing “Big Sugar” for what they allege to be years of massive wage cheating. In attempting to collect damages of close to $51 million, Tuddenham has had to scrape together loans from the Southern Poverty Law Center and beg for grants from legal-aid foundations. He has several local co-counsels, and they are assisted by Florida Legal Services.
In the course of the case, Tuddenham has sparred with some of the players who were fighting over the presidential election in Florida this past November and December, including Joseph Klock, the Miami litigator who argued in court for Katherine Harris, Florida’s secretary of state. “What I saw on TV,” Tuddenham says, referring to the hidden agendas and the endless wrangles over dimples, dents, and chads, “has eerie parallels to my own experience over the last 20 years.” Tuddenham’s journey through the labyrinth of the sugar lobby and the Cuban-American zeitgeist in South Florida provided a window into the roiling tensions that placed Palm Beach and Miami-Dade Counties at the epicenter of the recent battle for the White House.
Back in the 80s, Tuddenham’s struggle suggested a David-and-Goliath theme: the zealous legal-aid lawyer versus Big Sugar, during a time when the courts were becoming ever more conservative. Not long ago, lawyers like Tuddenham were admired for their idealism, but now many people consider them naïve and impractical, arguing lofty principles before juries who want to get home in time for Oprah or Monday Night Football. In the less compassionate, more self-interested America of 2001, is the practice of public-interest law becoming an anachronism? Tuddenham’s long crusade in South Florida raises an even larger issue: Is public-interest law virtually impotent in the legal and business climate of America today?
The case that drew me to Palm Beach County and Tuddenham, Bygrave v. Okeelanta, also poses a vexing moral dilemma: At what point does public-interest law stop being a matter of principle and become a battle of egos, a need to win? Twenty years after the battle of the Harvard men versus Hereford, the paradox continues to trouble Edward Tuddenham. “I have a recurring nightmare,” he says. “I am on a subway, and I can’t get off.”
April 1999.
From the 11th floor of the West Palm Beach courthouse, you can see the Breakers hotel on the island town of Palm Beach, the red tiles on the roof of the museum that used to be the robber baron Henry Flagler’s mansion, the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, and the marina full of bobbing yachts, among them the 95-foot Crili, which belongs to Alfonso “Alfy” Fanjul, the head of Florida Crystals, whose subsidiaries, Atlantic, Osceola, and Okeelanta, are corporate defendants in Bygrave. For Tuddenham, the psychic difference between the Texas border and West Palm Beach is nonexistent. He believes that both are nether places of political-influence peddling, where Anglo and immigrant cultures collide. From Palm Beach, he can drive 90 minutes and be in the Third World, in the sugarcane-growing town of Belle Glade, with its squalor and its historical lack of regard for the rights Americans take for granted. The Palm Beach sheriff’s deputies once used police dogs to break up protesting workers on a Fanjul property.
More:
http://www.mariebrenner.com/PDF/KingdomOfBigSugar.pdf
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George H. W. Bush, Barbara Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and prominent Republican donor Jose 'Pepe Fanjul
Alfy, Pepe
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Few deals are sweeter than US Sugar Subsidies
December 9, 2012 at 3:07 pm in Class War by IfLizWereQueen
Pepe and Alfonso Fanjul pose for a PR photo for a PR story about their “generosity” in The LandReport – Nov 29, 2012
Another Story of Two Government Welfare Corporate Brothers–the Fanjuls
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. Then in 1959, after their father lost one of Cuba’s great sugar fortunes to Castro’s revolution, Alfy and Pepe Fanjul built a new empire in Florida, importing cheap Jamaican labor to do the brutal, dangerous work of sugarcane harvesting, and wielding ever more political power in Tallahassee and Washington, D.C.
At 2 a.m. on the morning of January 1, 1959, dictator Fulgencio Batista and his family boarded airplanes and flew away from Cuba. The revolution led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara had won, and, after a general strike and the fall of several government institutions, Castro emerged as prime minister on February 16.
The Fanjul family had been watching a fireworks show in Havana harbor when Batista fled, but they had not been oblivious of the changing attitudes in their homeland. As José “Pepe” Fanjul, scion of Lillian and Alfonso and the current co-head of the family business, noted in an interview with LondonTimes investigative reporter Peter Watson, “My father had tried to get Batista to allow Cuba to return to democracy. So when Castro came in, we were not the first people he went for. Batista’s immediate entourage was executed early on. But then, throughout 1960, pressures were put on the business community, and my grandfather and father thought it was wiser to leave. That year, month by month, the family emigrated.”
There were no public good-byes, no tearful gatherings at the airport, no big public sale of assets. The Fanjuls left unobtrusively with only what they could carry. They left fortunes behind, but they were far from pauperism. When they finally did apply for a particular form of American welfare, it was a far different one from that given to those living in the barrios of Miami and Los Angeles. The Fanjuls get $65 million a year in agricultural subsidies through a federal program meant to support American farmers and sugar producers.
More:
http://iflizwerequeen.com/2012/12/09/few-deals-are-sweeter-than-us-sugar-subsidies_q_16079.html