Grubstakers - Episode 177: The Fanjul Brothers (Florida Crystals/Domino Sugar)

Episode Date: July 16, 2020

For our triumphant return from summer vacation we profile the Fanjul brothers, two Florida billionaires who had to flee their native Cuba when Fidel Castro came to power. This may have had something to do with the fact that they trace their wealth to slave run sugar plantations and their former mansion is now a museum to the cruelty of the sugar industry in Cuba. Since arriving in the US they've been showered with plentiful subsidies and price supports and they've found even found new workers to abuse and exploit by using the H-2 visa program and by looking the other way at the trafficking of desperately impoverished Haitians in the Dominican Republic. If you're looking for motivation to consume less sugar and more vegetables this episode is here to make the case. Further reading on the Fanjul brothers: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2001/02/floridas-fanjuls-200102

It's the kind of thing that makes the average citizen puke. I look at this system and say, yeah, you know, what's going on? I don't know anything about this man except I've read bad stuff about him. And I don't like, you know, I don't like what I read about him. We are more than just one coin. We create the world around this coin. Cop. Invention. Cop. Cop. In 5, 4, 3, the evil has gone.

Hello and welcome back to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. My name is Sean P. McCarthy and I'm joined today by all of my co-conspirators. Andy Palmer. Steve Jeffries. Yogi Poliwal. And it's good to be back with you, the listener, after we took a short hiatus. And for our return episode, we wanted to kind of break from our usual theme, our usual theme of talking about billionaires

who engage in crushing labor exploitation and environmental degradation and all that depressing stuff. And instead, we're going to talk about some billionaires who are sugar barons and do none of that. Because I don't know about the rest of you, but all of the happiest memories of my childhood involve sugar candy.

And I just can't imagine there could be anything but joy throughout that entire supply chain. And my childhood nostalgia will not allow me to think anything else. We're talking about the Fonjul brothers, and they were actually expelled from Cuba for running a Willy Wonka operation that was too whimsical yes uh castro um was outraged when he heard about what the fond jewel brothers were doing to the umpalumpas they they still they still can't find that elevator

but yes as andy mentioned today specifically we're going to be talking about the Von Jewell brothers of Palm Beach, Florida. It's Alfonso and Jose Pepe Von Jewell. They have a combined net worth of $8.2 billion, according to Bloomberg, as of August 2017. And according to Vanity Fair, they control about 40% of Florida's sugar crop. Damn. Yeah. So these are extremely powerful people um they own the company florida crystals which is the largest of the big three florida sugar producers and they sell their sugar under the brand name um domino so if you've been in the supermarket if you're an american you might have seen these yellow and white bags with the blue font that say domino Sugar on them. That's the Von Hul brothers.

Yeah, I believe that's an East Coast brand. I don't know if they got Domino on the West Coast. Not that that matters, but I remember growing up, I was watching King of Queens, and they had Domino Sugar. And I remember thinking to myself, man, what an interesting fake sugar brand. Then when I moved to New York, I was like, oh, no, that's a real sugar brand. I'm just an idiot. But yeah, no, they own a lot of properties. They own 155,000 acres of sugar plantation in Florida,

another 240,000 acres in the Dominican Republic. They own a resort in the Dominican Republic. They own yachts. They even own a US Senator named Marco Rubio. So there is no doubt in my mind today that we are dealing with the billionaires who have the foam party pictures that's why that guy's so thirsty he's not fucking dehydrated he's diabetic and so there's a lot of information about the fun jewels uh they're you know power players in florida politics you know power players in u.s politics um but i think the best place to start when we go through this and we're going to talk about their involvement in horrific labor abuses, both in the U.S. and abroad, the heavy subsidies they receive from the U.S. government, the environmental damage they do, and all these other topics. back and explain for those who don't know the history of the sugar trade throughout you know the colonial world because the fondules their father was a sugar baron who fled to florida when

when fidel castro took over cuba in 1959 in fact fidel castro turned their father's mansion into a museum in havana that you can still visit today that details the horrific abuses of sugar barons such as their father. And he also turned Alfonso and Pepe's childhood home into one of his several personal residences. To even kind of back the story up even before their father, you actually do have to start with the Spanish colonization of Cuba. Spain colonized the island of Cuba in the 1500s. And just according to Wikipedia, Cuba's indigenous population was completely exterminated by the Spanish. Part of that was due to lethal forced labor, slavery. So in the course of the 1500s, all native Cubans were murdered. And as a result, the colonists, the Spanish colonists in Cuba,

they needed new slaves to grow their crops and maintain production. And so Cuba became a hub of the Atlantic slave trade. Again, from Wiki, more than one million African slaves were brought to Cuba as part of the Atlantic slave trade. So the people who would go on to work for their father were for the most part descended of actual stolen african slaves that is just kind of like what was the reality of sugar throughout the uh european world and particularly in the 19th century was it was a slave crop. Harvesting sugar is extremely dangerous even today.

You've got to go out there with a machete. There's lots of injuries. Lots of people hurt themselves. It's baking hot sun. You have to wear a lot of protective gear, so you're just sweating. And you could lop your leg off with a machete at any moment. And as a result, Cuba, slavery in cuba was not formally abolished until 1886 so that's 20 years after the united states um abolished slavery and then this ties

to pepe and alfonso's father because alfonso senior their father was born in 1909 so he's born just 33 years after slavery officially ends in cuba he's born in cuba and he takes over a family fortune of sugar plantations that until 33 years ago had been entirely based on human slaves so this is the long and short of how these two became two of the most powerful billionaires in Florida and U.S. politics. And, you know, I mean, like the listener just hearing that, I'm sure they have an image in their head of what conditions were like for slaves on those plantations. But, you know, this is a 20-hour workday. These people were worked to death, exterminated, starved, beaten, maimed, anything you can imagine and so kind of why i want to bring that up is to emphasize that when it comes to the history of sugar this is not ancient history this kind of continues today

in a obviously not as brutal form but a lot of the people who are in the dominican republic working for the fun fun hules and doing 12-hour work days for two u.s dollars a day a lot of them are descended from former sugar cane slaves and part of what made the revolution of fidel castro possible in 1959 was the horrific treatment of the descendants of slaves by people like the fun hool brothers father who was i believe the largest sugar plantation owner in Cuba at the time of Castro's revolution. And so this brings us to their father, Alfonso Fonhuel Sr., as I mentioned, born in 1909. His family owned the Karzana Ka Rwanda Company, which had operations in New York, Havana and London and the Cuban trading company in Cuba. He was, of course, grew up in the colonial elite of Cuba.

He graduates from Catholic University of the Americas in Washington, D.C. And then what happens in 1936, he gets married to Lilian Rosa Gomez Mena, who was the daughter of Jose Gomez Mena, whose family owned Cuba's new Gomez Mena sugar company. And this marriage united two of Cuba's leading sugar fortunes, creating a combined business of 10 sugar mills, three distilleries, and wide real estate holdings. So basically, the Fanjul brothers are descended from not one,

but two different colonial sugar holdings that trace their roots back to slavery on their maternal side as well as their paternal side right it's as if pepsi and coke came together and their families became one and then they had a fucking soda empire the the poco let's move on no no i got it it's like if Bill Gates' son married Steve Jobs' daughter and they created a fucking fusion of tech that was a mix of Apple and Microsoft. Micropole.

Wait, hold on. Now that we're a little off the rails, can we go back to talking about our fond sugar memories? Because I wanted to say that I had a sex dream about Def Leppard. Recently? Like a couple weeks ago. They play their hits when you're doing it. But I guess, I mean, do you guys have,

when you think back to your childhood, I guess fond memories of sugar or any idea of what kind of supply chain conditions existed for sugar until recently in your lives? No, no, I didn't have any idea of what kind of supply chain conditions existed for sugar until recently in your lives? No, no, I didn't have any idea of what sugar fucking plantations were like, but I was fucking scarfing Reese's down my fucking fat chubby cheeks. What are you, crazy?

Yeah, I was mostly assaulted by the commercials and all their colors to be like, well, all those kids are pretty happy writing down those Twizzler slides. Maybe I went in on that. I just thought the supply chain was as sweet as the product. I remember that on Halloween it was free, and I just would wait until the day I could get free candy because when I was growing up my dad worked at Microsoft and so they they used to do the thing where you could do like trick-or-treat with each office and so like one year I got like a desktop

PC's box worth of candy and I was like I'm fucking mate like you know like in Grand Theft Auto when you do like that first big heist and you have like you know a couple hundred thousand dollars and you're like holy shit I'm fucking rich I felt like that but then my mom would give it away to my cousins in India and I never forgave her those starving people in India how dare she I was like I was like I remember I had just a box of candy I was was like, no, no, Yogi, that was a dream. And then we'd go to India, and suddenly all my cousins would have my fucking, fucking spoils. And my mom robbed me of them. No, I mean, like, you know, it was, I ate so much sugar within the last 10 years that I became pre-diabetic for a little bit. So sugar is something that has plagued me my entire life.

And I remember when it occurred, I had broken up with a woman. And so I ate an entire brownie dessert. This was a summer where I was smoking a lot of pot and just eating ice cream every other night, basically. And I went to Danny's and had an entire brownie dessert because a girl had broken up with me. And then I got a physical the next day and they're like, you're-diabetic and i'm like oh no uh and then i went to a pharmacy and went down and saw like the diabetes aisle and i'm like this is a racket like this is just straight there doesn't need to be 80 pills for eat more vegetables and work out more like like when the solution is that simple how can there be 90 fucking medications for solving the problem of diabetes

but it's an epidemic because sugar is in all of the food in the united states we don't have nutrition we have poison when it comes to our food i hope the fun hools were listening to yogi say he's pre-diabetic and they go damn we almost got him could have nipped this one in the bud but no when i was a kid i just thought Gene Wilder made all the candy himself. Didn't really think there were other kids more directly involved in the candy process than myself. But yeah, and as Yogi's saying, you know, of course sugar is linked to obesity. And another way the fun hools and the other big sugar companies have thrown their political muscle around in the U.S. is apparently the George W. Bush administration in 2003, at the behest of big sugar, threatened to defund the World Health Organization.

You might be familiar, the Trump administration has now administration made this threat in 2003 because the world health organization put out a paper that said sugar should not be more than 10 of your diet which was a horrific offense to those uh science-based gentlemen at big sugar trump trump made trump made good on that right he left who who oh my uh gum started bleeding just at the idea of a diet that's even 10 sugar but to return to the subjects for today we mentioned of course their father um alfonso senior he marries into uh the gomez minas sugar family so he unites the two different sugar baron families and i'm going to quote from vanity fair here of the ruling sugar families in cuba the lobos were thought of as the most decent whereas the gomez menas had a reputation for being ruthless well alfonso and pepe attended

dances at havana yacht club cuba's 500 000 cane cutters virtually starved six months out of the year. In Havana, at the Museo de la Revolucion, there are now special display cases showing the brutal conditions in the sugar fields, which helped bring about the fall of the Batista regime. So again, not only are they from two different colonial sugar families, but they're also from the one that has the reputation of being the worst that starved their sugar cane workers six months out of the year. Jeez. And so, you know, that's as good a point of any to kind of get into the story of the two brothers and just the three main sources I used for this episode.

There's a 2005 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary called Big Sugar. The documentary series Rotten on Netflix has an episode called A Sweet Deal. And there's a 2001 Vanity Fair long piece that's the one that I just quoted from. It's titled In the Kingdom of Big Sugar by Marie Brenner. So most of the facts I cite throughout this episode will come from one of those three pieces. But to start with Alfonso and Pepe Fanjul. Alfonso is the younger brother. He's born in 1937, and Pepe Fanjul is born in 1944. So Castro comes to power in 1959. He nationalizes their plantations. He seizes their houses. Their father flees to the U.S. He briefly leaves his children running the company. Their father owned apartment buildings in New York, and he was convinced he could wait out the revolution and then return home.

Alfonso was left in charge of the business. And apparently, just according to the Vanity Fair, part of what the Fenhoul brothers, what led them to get involved in U.S. politics is the fear of what happened in Cuba, what happened in Cuba happening again in the U.S. They believe that their father made a mistake by not getting involved in politics. According to Vanity Fair, the Fanjuls said that their father grew up in a world of bribes

where he was paying bribes to the Batista dictatorship in Cuba, but they describe it as, as quote the cost of doing business but apparently he like turned down the ambassadorship when batista offered uh him an ambassadorship uh i would have stopped the revolution and alfonso says of his father quote he was above politics unquote uh so again paying bribes to the batista dictatorship while you're running the most horrific sugarcane plantations in the batista dictatorship but uh he's he's kind of apolitical really kind of a centrist i i guess the family um they collectively are more or less centrist which tells you a lot about centrism where where one of the brothers, let's see, Pepe, he's the Republican donor and Alfie is the Democrat donor.

But it's also very telling that in Cuba, they're like, yeah, bribes were just, you know, you bribe the politicians. That's the cost of doing business. You know, we don't do that anymore. We just donate to everyone's campaign. So, what, they like Hamilton and stuff? Oh, yeah.

Oh, you know they bought so many Hamilton tickets. Inadvertently, money was given to Lin-Manuel Miranda so that the epidemic of sugar could continue in the United States. But you know one politician that they couldn't buy? One man that rose above all the sugar nonsense? Bob Dole.

Was not above big tobacco money, though. That's true. He's in the pocket of big newspaper to cover your Viagra erection. Bob Dole thinks that sugar isn't addictive enough. Bob Dole thinks that sugar is getting in the way of getting kids addicted to the real stuff. But yes, so as we mentioned, their father, Al alfonso senior he flees with the castor revolution alfonso jr is running the business in cuba for a bit but he says he got death threats he had somebody shoot at his car he recognized which way the wind was blowing he goes to new york as well um and apparently uh their you know, the manager of the most horrific sugar plantation

in Cuba at the time of the revolution told them, quote, you have an imperative to build up the business again, this money will not last until the next generation. But they actually come to the United States at an opportune time. Because of course, the United States is looking to overthrow Fidel Castro via the CIA. The Eisenhower administration starts by embargoing Castro. And so they're also trying to encourage domestic alternatives to Castro. And one of the things that the US is trying to do is encourage domestic sugar production because they just embargoed Cuba. They don't want to give Fidel Castro any money. So the Fanjul brothers come over, and they're in a very good situation

because what had happened in the 1950s in Florida, the Army Corps of Engineers had drained thousands of acres of the Everglades Swamp and made this into agricultural land. And actually, the consequences of this are still being felt today. Some of the destruction of the Everglades, the natural habitats in the Everglades, are because of what the Army Corps of Engineers did in the 50s. The Everglades used to get fresh water flowing into it, but the core, of course, diverted all this fresh water to actual agricultural purposes.

So there's too much salt water, basically, in the Everglades, and a lot of natural habitat is being wiped out as a result of that. And we'll mention briefly there are geoengineering, shall I say, solutions that people have come up with uh that the fun hules have fought against because it would involve um shutting down some of their sugar

production land but okay i'm kind of with them on this one though um because who here is going to really miss alligators they're like they're part of biodiversity or whatever yeah people people would have too many pet cats if the alligators disappeared cats would take over the pet ecosystem you wouldn't without them you wouldn't worry about your kid being eaten by them i also think uh gators keep floridians in line. You know what I mean? They can't become the ultimate versions of themselves because you never know when a gator's around the corner that's willing to bite. Maybe that's what makes Floridians the way they are. Maybe once you get rid of the gators,ida is just gonna um turn into scandinavia if you if you get rid of the gators it's just like all is permitted

yeah social democracy fine apparently little did they foresee how they were creating the next castro by destroying the gators once the Alligators were eliminated, socialism ran free. The Gators are the key reactionary force in foreign politics. But yeah, so as you mentioned, these thousands of acres

that the Army Corps of Engineers drains in the Everglades, the Von Hul brothers, they go down to palm beach florida where they've been ever since uh 1960 um they find three dilapidated plants in louisiana and after they enlisted two partners they acquired them for 165 000 us dollars the funhools had the plants dismantled and taken by barge uh to oceano oceana 4,000-acre parcel of land in the Everglades. That's a quote from Vanity Fair.

This is all in 1960. So they start out with their father. They buy 4,000 acres in the Everglades. They get some plants, and they move the equipment down there, and they start sugar harvesting in the Everglades. But basically, they're doing okay for a while, but what really makes this thing take off is what's called the H-2 visa program

in the United States. So Vanity Fair quotes one of the lawyers who had litigated against them, and he says that this H-2 visa program was created in the I'm not quoting from him, but I'm paraphrasing. The H-2 visa program was

created in the 1950s, and by the 1980s, 8,000 workers were coming every year seasonally, seasonal farm workers. And in the case of Florida, it was mainly Jamaican workers who would come, they would do the harvest season, then they would go back to Jamaica. Now I'm quoting from the attorney quoted by Vanity Fair. With the help of the Department of Labor, but with virtually no supervision by the department, growers brought in thousands of Jamaicans to cut the sugar cane. Workers who could not cut fast enough were often labeled, quote, Code One, meaning refused work, do not rehire, and deported. The laborers had little recourse. They lived in remote camps on the farms and had no access to legal services in the entire southeast area there was only one official from the department of labor to monitor work conditions the fun hules expanded their acreage

throughout the everglades so basically when we talk about them getting support from the government that starts with the government fucking draining the everglades to give them sugar plantations uh you know then subsidizing water giving them all these other subsidies just to try to compete with castro and it goes up to them uh the u.s government basically giving them a slave workforce like for all intents and purposes the jamaicans who would come over on this h2 visa program if they complained about being shorted, having their wages stolen, they were labeled Code 1, they were deported back to Jamaica, and they would never come back to the U.S. again. So, I mean, it's a very horrifying thing, and I think what I want people to understand, we quoted that attorney who sued them and said over the period of eight years, they stole $100 million in wages from these Jamaican laborers. That's just eight years. They were doing this program from 1960 to 1994.

It was 34 years of just wage theft throughout the entire 34 years. And yeah, they shut it down. They mechanized their Florida fields. They don't have these migrant workers there anymore. But all those wages that they stole, they still have that shit. They're still collecting capital income on all of that stolen and exploited labor. That's fucking insane. How are you supposed to not make money if you're given a fucking slave regime to fucking do the work that you have to create all your mass income?

I could do so much with slaves from the government you know how many podcasts I could produce if I had slaves from the government one of the worst uses of slaves but I mean like you know like I've never

I didn't know this stuff going into this episode, but, you know, the notion that sugar, which is infinitely available in this country and is cheaper than water in some places, like the fact that it is built on this mountain of bodies that is the wage theft of the Jamaican population in Florida. Horrendous. Fucking horrendous. By the way, I'm picturing someone video calling home saying, they took my passport and now they're telling me to juice up the laughs on this segment on eating butt. But yeah, as Yogi just said, how could you lose money when you have an actual slave workforce on visas supplied by the U.S. government? Well, they actually did manage to one time.

The last time the sugar industry actually faced any sort of crisis or any sort of profit loss was in 1974, just quoting from Vanity Fair. A price spike in the sugar industry drove it into overproduction and the bottom fell out of the market. The government rushed in with guaranteed loans and financing, which became the basis of the current sugar program. It dates all the way back to 1974. And these are these regularly renewed farm bills. And they set up three pillars of support for the sugar industry. The US limits the amount of sugar that can be produced in the U.S. It restricts imports of sugar. If there's a surplus of sugar, the federal government will buy it. So you are literally guaranteed a profit if you produce sugar in the U.S.

And various estimates of this subsidy, again, dating all the way back to 1974, peg it at about $3 to $4 billion year, U.S. consumers are subsidizing the sugar industry. And at least 65 million of that directly goes into the pocket of the fenn hules every year. So, I mean, it's like, you know, we sometimes deal with billionaires who are somewhat intelligent or whatever else, but like in this case, it's just from the beginning, they literally trace their wealth back to literal human bondage and slavery.

And then they get a government program exploiting migrant labor. And then they get a government set up subsidy program that guarantees them a profit every year, uh, pays them $ million dollars for doing nothing and then they just spread campus spread some of that around in campaign donations and nobody will ever take away their free windfall that makes them worth eight billion dollars i would argue that it takes some intelligence to pull that off and they would actually be less destructive if they were dumber but their their dad did that right i mean they didn't well yeah i mean i guess their dad kind

of set up a system to get it going i'm not saying they earned it i'm just saying you you have to kind of at least know how to grease the wheels and it helps to be wildly wealthy uh at the starting gate um yeah but if they were if they were like you know just dipshit jet setters they would have a more positive like who just blew through their dad's money they would have a more positive impact on the world than these assholes actually do yeah for sure like whenever we have one of like the layabout billionaires like one of their sons or daughters like those are that's how you that's like least harm basically yeah that's like harm that's harm reduction but yeah that's totally fair they uh part of their intelligence is how they are able to keep this system going. Their father does initially set it up. Their father dies in 1980.

So their father was apparently a confidant of President Gerald Ford, and he made donations to President Ronald Reagan's campaign in 1980. He caught him when he tripped. So, yeah, in 1974, this Farm Sugar Price Supports Program is set up, and it continues to this day because apparently sugar is 2% of all crops produced in the United States, but the sugar industry contributes 20% of all crop campaign contributions in the United States. Oh, really? Wow. a disproportionate amount of political money. But yeah, so they get this H2 workforce program. Obviously, as we mentioned here, these workers from Jamaica would be promised one thing on a contract, and then they get to Florida,

and it's like, hey, you're going to make, you know, half what we said on this contract, or you're going to make less than minimum wage, and if you don't like it, we'll fucking send you back to Jamaica. You're in the middle of nowhere. You don't know anybody. Not so much you can do. And then, in 1983, the Fanjuls buy 240,000 acres in the Dominican Republic, 240,000 acres of sugar plantation from the Gulf and Western Sugar,

from the Gulf and Western Company after its ceo dies in 1983 they buy this for about 240 million dollars and i liked this quote from vanity fair one lawyer involved in um the sale on the gulf and western side quote had gone down to look at the cane cutter the sugar cane cutter's barracks in the dominican republic he found them'm quoting, one degree short of Dachau, unquote. Oh, wow. So this lawyer tells Vanity Fair that, yeah, the workers, the conditions they were living in that we sold to the von Huls were just one degree short of a Nazi concentration camp.

And then the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 2005 goes out to the von Hull plantations and asks workers there if conditions have improved since the purchase in 1983. And they found multiple workers who would go on camera and say things have gotten worse. We are even hungrier than we were in 1983. So, you know, the arc of history is long and it bends towards justice yeah i mean uh to continue on this point i watched this documentary called price of sugar it's on youtube and these were it was focused on the sugar workers in the dominican republic and the bodies of the people that are doing this job it's like skeletons like you know the horrific

visions you have of the holocaust uh survivors and the camps and all those are what these people look like because they are working untold hours every day and it's not like they're gonna you know fucking i get to have a olive garden endless pasta bowl after this. Like, no, they're fucking starving. And sugar literally causes diabetes, but it's starving these people to death. And there's no irony worse than the fact that the thing that's killing Americans because it's making us too fat is literally robbing these people of their lives via nutrition. That's fucking chilling. Yeah. robbing these people of their lives via nutrition that's fucking chilling yeah and um even to add on that uh there was actually a an article in al jazeera in 2015 um i don't know when the documentary was made uh but uh they reported the exact same thing uh someone who was working at the um u.s department of labor who was trying to i guess negotiate better working conditions um visited one of the uh dominican

republic uh plantations and she said what i saw made me sick the cane workers were skeletons wearing rags one old man told us we have no access to anything from our pensions they had worked for 40 to 50 years and nothing i wanted to cry all the way home i thought after all this work this is how these people live and by all this work she meant the department of labor they um they pushed a uh it's called the dominican republic central Free Trade Agreement, which was kind of a prototype for the now-dead Trans-Pacific Partnership. And the idea was it was a trade agreement where there would be much stronger labor protections. And it turns out that even when you have an agreement like that, it all comes down to whether or not those protections are enforced.

And so even after this was passed, they still didn't enforce these protections. And, you know, it's the same situation that it was in the 80s. You know, these people, again, skeletons being worked to death. Right. And just one last thing. The thing that Sean was mentioning where they were taking Cubans and taking them to Florida, in the DR, they're taking Haitians and trafficking them into the Dominican Republic. And so these people, they can't, you know, that thing you mentioned, Sean, where the

Jamaicans would be classified as like class one and then they would be like deported or whatever. I don't know about that. I think those people, some of them, if not a lot of them were just straight murdered I mean like I know that that's a heinous allegation and I'm going to say allegedly after this but I mean like it just seems to me that the sugar

trade is so deadly that if a person was going to stand up against and not work as hard as they want them to it's not it's not all right you get to go back home to your home country it's we're going to put you on a boat and at one point you're gonna get off the boat and not get back on you know here's here's what a dumb kid i was i remember there was a show i think it was on nbc with jimmy smiths called cane and he's a sugar baron and i remember seeing some previews

for that and thinking that's dumb they're just doing sugar because it's network and they don't want to talk about cocaine. Where the real, like, what could a sugar plantation owner be doing that's bad? And I guess a lot of people agreed with me because I think it got canceled after one season. But, you know, it just shows you. You just assume it's like, oh, a legal product. How bad could the labor abuse going on be? And then you do the slightest bit of digging. And these people are every bit as evil and abusive towards their workers as any fucking cartel lord.

Any cocaine king, Ben. Oddly enough, it's good that you said allegedly, Yogi, because there's this, the author who wrote the book Strip Tease that was adapted into a demi more movie and i did some selective research on that um there in his book there are characters who are uh sugar man cuban brothers who are sugar barons and the author has been asked repeatedly whether these are the fahool brothers and he's repeatedly denied it and i'm certain that he is entirely covering his ass sure yeah because even even once you've made a um written a book that became a movie that ruined demi moore's career i still have to be careful about these fuckers suing you uh but yeah so as we mentioned with the dominican republic the u.s um puts quotas on sugar imports to keep the price high i don't know if it's changed with the free

trade agreement but as of 2001 it was dominican republic gets a kind of preferential place i believe they they are allowed 17 of all imports under the sugar quota and the majority of that is done by the funhool brothers uh like we said they own 240 000 acres in the dominican republic um and then just from the documentary rotten on netflix um they say that basically the average world market price of sugar at the wholesale level is 15 cents per pound raw sugar in the u.s it's about 25 cents per pound. So it's about 40% higher. And again, that's at the wholesale level. So it's just a little

bit at a time, but that adds up to about 3 to 4 billion U.S. is paid extra by consumers in the U.S. every year. And the high price of sugar is also part of the reason we've seen the shift to high fructose corn syrup because it's so much cheaper to make soda and shit out of that. You fixed sugar prices.

Man, remember when Pete Buttigieg was a fucking problem in our lives? What a fucking mook and a fucking ghost at this point. He'll be back. That guy doesn't eat any sugar. I think he's getting a TV deal now. So, you know, we get to watch him on CNN. He's writing a tv deal now so you know he's writing we get to watch him on cnn he's writing a book about trust and also a tv thing oh you know good good good for him um i wish him all the best success in life um you know it's not hard out it's not easy out there

i only wish him success if he eats the butt of his partner if that man's being annually pleased i'm totally fine with him wanting to ruin the rest of my life yeah well he's but he lost income after uh chucky cheese no longer needed an animatronic rat to entertain the kids but yeah and so all these subsidies all these supports we've laid out part of how they uh keep this going as we mentioned is these political donations but you know as andy was saying earlier the brothers alfonso is supposedly like a bill clinton democrat uh whereas his brother pepe is like you know a fundraising chairman for george w bush very close to the republican party um like andy was mentioning earlier according to the star report monica lewinsky in 1996 was in the oval

office with bill clinton and observed him taking a 30-minute phone call with alfonso funhool which is pretty interesting it's like this guy is so powerful he can get bill clinton on the phone in the middle of like a blow job with his mistress and apparently this 30-minute phone call took place right after Al Gore made a public push in 1996 to tax sugar producers one cent per pound to clean up the Everglades. And that was, of course, dropped. So that's probably why Alfonso Von Hul was calling Bill Clinton and talking for 30 minutes, as observed by Monica Lewinsky. And apparently also, Bill Clinton's Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt arranged a deal on the Everglades property that was owned by the federal government with the Funhull family in 1993, shortly after his inauguration. Hey Alfonso, I hear your problem, but if you were to come by and give me three, maybe five

pounds of sugar, I think we could solve this whole problem. Just don't bring your brother, Pepe. I don't trust that man. You know what? I'll see you later at Jeff's party. Pepe, photographed with Jeffrey Epstein, 2005. Alfonso, I got to put you you on speakerphone my hands are busy right now yeah it's one of the one of the interesting um things about their kind of tag team relationship

with uh between alfonso and pepe with with politicians is that it seems like Alfonso was majorly influential in the development of NAFTA. And now Pepe, now that Trump ran on getting rid of NAFTA, Pepe through his connections with Wilbur Ross, who is Trump's Secretary of Commerce, we brought him up in an earlier episode because he's one of those guys who kind of pretended to be a billionaire. And then it turns out just to be a loser, 100 millionaire. He is extremely influential in helping Trump to kind of rewrite the new, i guess the new nafta whatever that agreement whatever form that agreement's going to take shape as um and pepe actually originally he supported michael rubio for president but once uh that plane uh stalled on the runway he once

once those soap suds weren't bubbling anymore yeah uh he threw all his weight behind trump and uh actually uh through wilbur ross helped run some fundraisers in florida to get him elected and so if you think that the new version of nafta is going to be any better than the previous version i i don't know who has diluted i don't think anyone who's listening to this has deluded themselves into thinking that. But it it clearly is not going to pan out that way. It's probably going to be more or less the same thing, probably somehow going to be worse. Sure. But so with the time we have left, I just want to talk a bit about in a little more detail this this labor exploitation we've been talking about. Obviously, it's it's graphic. It it's depressing but i think people should know and i think a lot of us don't know and we don't have any excuse for for not knowing because you know if you're in the

u.s or europe uh you're responsible for this stuff too um you should know what goes into the products you you buy and consume uh so the fun hools, we mentioned again this H-2 visa program. These Jamaican workers were coming to Florida, and this is kind of the first stage of their labor abuse. According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Jamaican H-2 workers, they labored all day in these shacks set up for them near the plantation in Florida. If they wanted food, they had to buy it from the company employing them, often at a significant markup. So they were doing company towns in Florida for decades. Quoting from Vanity Fair, every November for nearly 50 years, from 1944 to 1993, about 10,000 workers arrived in the South Floridaida from the caribbean to harvest sugar cane

the season lasted until march and the work was so dangerous that one in every three missed a day of work or more due to an injury some lost fingers and eyes the mucky ground made machine harvesting impractical so one in every three was injured on the job. There were no time clocks. Jamaicans swore that their hours were routinely shorted by the ticket writers who reported to the field bosses. Sometimes, the Jamaicans alleged in depositions, they were paid for only four hours of work when they had worked the entire day. Often, the Jamaicans cut 10 or more tons of sugar cane a day. There was one, the lawyer Tuttenham alleges that thousands were paid as little as $25 a day, about half of the minimum wage, the federal minimum wage. We mentioned earlier, Tuttenham gives that figure, that over just eight years, 20,000 workers lost about $100 million.

Andy mentioned a 2013 Department of Labor report report these go all the way back there was a 1973 department of labor report this is the nixon administration uh that says that these uh these um cane cutters in florida were regularly having their hours stolen e.g they would be marked as having reported 30 minutes later than they actually did or marked as having left 30 minutes later than they actually did or marked as having left 30 minutes later than they actually did. Workers in their barracks were warned not to talk to legal aid workers. They would put up signs saying legal aid workers are not your friends. Wow. The implicit threat was, of course, you will be deported if you talk to these people.

And then the most horrifying story is, you know, Yoki mentioned earlier the alleged murder. I want to give you the next best thing that happened in November 22nd, 1986. I'm quoting from Vanity Fair here. taken on a crew that refused to accept the pay conditions on the funhool fields some 100 cane cutters from saint vincent had balked at the wages offered as in all labor disputes a liaison officer was called but the two sides could not agree on a figure the workers started to walk the eight miles back to the camp and the next morning still with no agreement 40 of them refused to get on the bus at that point uh the personnel manager called in the police all in all 384 workers many of whom had had nothing to do with the argument in the fields were deported cooks in the kitchen cutters from the other parts of the property all were sent back to the islands they were not even given times to gather their possessions t-shirts and boom boxes

were strewn all over the ground some of the men had just completed the apple harvest, one lawyer recalls, and they had bought household goods to take home. All of it was left behind. So 100 workers rebel against the conditions. The fucking sheriffs, the Palm Beach County police are called in with riot gear and attack dogs to deport 384 workers to break any sort of labor action here so these are the conditions this is how these people made their fucking money now would you say any of this was happening between like 1989 through like 1993 yeah i mean like obviously the worst of it was in the 70s and 80s but it continued all the way up until 94 and like the the basic story of the vanity fair

article is this lawyer we've been mentioning uh tuttenham uh he sued them for these back wages in 1993 um and they initially get a judgment of 50 million dollars paid to the workers but the fun who will actually appeal it and they go through the they go through the entire thing in vanity fair but it's kind of a mix of a technicality on the contract stuff and just corrupt corruption in the judiciary the entire settlement is thrown out so this guy spends over a decade in um in court trying to get these people their money back the fin hules ultimately win and part of the lawsuit is they're like we can just mechanize all our workforce now. We don't want to have to deal with this. So in 1994, all of the 10,000 Jamaicans are sent back and they just used mechanized cutting for the sugar cane in Florida now.

Were they billionaires at this point when that lawsuit had occurred? Do you think, Sean? They were probably close to it. I don't know their exact net worth, but I'm sure by like the 90s, they were, I would bet by the 90s they were billionaires. Well, I'll say this. If this happened between 89 and 93, I think we can all agree. George Bush doesn't care about black people. Please call. And, you know

you can go on and on the Vanity Fair article quotes a Jamaican sugar cane cutter who says I knew we were being cheated but I couldn't say anything because if I did they would say that I was too smart or that I'm a ringleader to start a strike so I just had to accept their terms he talks about on several occasions I heard workers ask

for their ticket with the full eight hours and they were immediately deported or if, they would be deported the next time they asked for the full eight hours. So they all knew they were being cheated. They just didn't really have a choice. He says another thing, when you got sick or hurt on the job, you still had to work, or the worker had to give the company the first seven days free without pay. After the seven days were up, they paid you just $18 a day instead of the usual amount for eight hours. Sometimes we worked up to 12 hours, we only got $18 to it. Whenever you get cut by like a machete or whatever, you go to the doctor, you get it stitched,

and two days afterwards, you have to go back to work, no matter how bad the cut is. And the lawyer in this article, he manages to find, you know, former managers back in Jamaica who testify and sign affidavits saying, yeah, we shorted the workers. We made up their hours because the person above us said you have to cheat these workers out of hours or we're going to deport you. So it's I mean, it's like any fucking slave system. Right. It seems, it seems different to like a corporate office full of us citizens only by degree and not by kind. Right. Yeah. It's just the horrific nature of the work is like the main difference.

I mean like, yeah, any fucking office uses the same management structure where every level is incentive carrot and stick incentives to punish the level below them it's just when you're dealing with sugarcane harvesting you know one in every three people is getting injured people are losing eyes and cutting off fingers and stuff because it's a fucking very dangerous and very difficult job to to wield a razor sharp machete and cut sugarcane all day i mean like that in itself

like you have crews of people with literal machetes and they're still powerless to overthrow the people above them i mean like obviously i know why like i know that like they don't they don't have passwords they can't go anywhere you know but just the notion that like you know okay well we got this uh population they're harvesting uh beats and they're using ak-47s but don't worry we got them under control like it's just it like you can feel how imprisoned these people are that they're literally using weapons to do the job that they're being you know that they're being used as slaves for and they can't escape this punishment you know when he said that thing about uh they they knew they're being fucked but they they they can't do anything about it it is um as if i can touch the nerve with

me i um i don't know how to explain this but uh for a good chunk of my life uh hiding intelligence has been something that i've done and a part of it is like race relations in the u.s and knowing that if you're a smart brown or black person that they'll take advantage of you and I don't know why when you said that part of me was just like that makes sense I know exactly what they're talking about if you show that you're intelligent they'll look at you like

you could be a target to incite a union and or uprising yeah that's fucking terrifying man and you know some listeners might say oh that's all in the past 1994 they don't do these horrific labor conditions and you know again first of all i would say to you they collected 100 million dollars of stolen wages over eight years they still get to spend that money they get to keep all the money they did that over multiple decades

so it's it's not really in the past beyond that, I would say they just moved their workforce to the Dominican Republic. And we've talked a bit about this 2005 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary called Big Sugar. I really recommend it. It's on YouTube. There are, according to this, 650,000 Haitians working in sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic. They're typically paid two U.S. dollars per day for a 12-hour workday. The CBC attributes 90,000 Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic living in 183 shantytowns in Fenhhoul brothers owned plantations. So at least 90,000 workers they have doing 12 hour days for $2 a day who don't eat anything before they go to the fields and

only get to have a small meal when they go home. And this is the corporation is called Central Romano. Again, this owns owned by the Fenhules owns 240 000 acres in dominican republic and the documentary goes through all of these different labor abuses as we mentioned taking passports uh indentured servitude uh and you know of course this is in the stifling heat each worker expected to cut a ton of sugar each day they have to buy from the company store if they want food at prices that are up to twice what they are in the town. The Catholic priest, Father Christopher Hartley, has documented the regular use of child labor. There is non-existent medical care.

And, you know, this is just horrific conditions. On that one point, the documentary I watched, The Price of Sugar, that's also on YouTube, that father that Sean mentioned, it opened with workers going to a medical tent, and a man has a cut on his arm, and the father asks him, hey, how did you get this cut? And the guy goes with the machete. It's like, okay, what did you put on it? He had put toothpaste on his cut to try and heal the cut. The medical conditions are so dire that the person went, I'll put toothpaste on his cut to try and heal the cut. The medical conditions are so dire that the person went,

I'll put toothpaste on it. The medical practitioner that was from Boston was like, this is the worst I've ever seen human beings in my life. Yeah. The CBC documentary finds one worker who was blinded at work in the Dominican Republic. He was awarded a pension that was so paltry he had to go back to the fields. He continued cutting cane while blind for 10 years.

Oh, my God. Jesus. And, you know, as we mentioned, the Fanjuls bought this 240,000 acres, the Central Romano Plantation, from Gulf and Western in 1983. The CBC asks these workers if life has gotten better or worse. They find at least two say it got worse. One says we go, quote, all day working without eating, unquote. And one of the most horrifying things of the CBC documentary is

the workers are forbidden to grow their own food. Fan Houle Company's employees will actually tear up vegetable gardens planted by the workers. They'll go through the town and rip up uh food sources planted by the workers and another thing the documentary documents is that when their children go hungry oftentimes they will go into the fields and munch on sugar cane and that is their entire meal for the day is just sugar cane um so you know you can't overstate how horrific the fucking conditions are here and the fact that like you know andy mentions this 2013 department of labor obama administration report that talks about all this stuff and says the

conditions here are slave-like or all that happens and the obama administration pockets it they don't do anything about this this is just kind of the world we live in where we all labor under the illusion that the united states abolish slavery but the reality is as long as nobody's paying attention the political class in this country has absolutely no qualms with allowing slavery all throughout our supply chains not even no qualms encouraging it if you're willing to pay me for it i'm willing to let you do it like you know i think it's easy to be uh you know oblivious because i certainly have been to the fact that everything sean just mentioned that that slavery exists in our nation to this day uh as long as you can pay for it but you know the the the moment i

figured out that uh a fine is just the cost for a rich person to do a crime is when i realized in some regards everything's legal if you can afford it yeah and the fen hules you know for contrast not far from their sugar plantation they own the luxury resort casa de campo in the dominican republic if you want to stay there on your exotic vacation. Apparently, they entertained President George H.W. Bush there in 2001. George Bush doesn't care about black people. He doesn't. Please call.

Quick draw, Yogi. But, you know, last thing on these Dominican plantations. As we mentioned, this Department of Labor report in 2013, it found that the Dominican sugar business, all the plantations there, did violate U.S. labor law. It found child labor, forced labor, and horrific working conditions in violation of the law. The U.S. never threatens to sanction Dominican growers in response to this report, which is what it naturally should do. And we've mentioned a bit the issue of pensions for Haitians in the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Supreme Court stripped citizenship from tens of thousands of ethnic Haitians in 2013, which removes their access to health insurance as

well as creates pension difficulties. And the thing is, part of the Catholic priest we mentioned earlier, Father Christopher Hartley, part of his work is helping these workers get, was helping these workers get pensions. He's since left the Dominican Republic. But he says that no central Romano workers that he's found have been able to get pensions. He's since left the Dominican Republic. But he says that no Central Romano workers that he's found have been able to get pensions. So he's been able to get them pensions at the other plantations, but he has not found one with a pension at the Fanjul Brothers plantation. He said he interviewed a 70-year-old man, 70 years old, who had been harvesting sugar since he was 10 years old he has no pension um and you know

i guess the last thing we could do is cbc the canadian broadcasting corporation actually did uh go to a swanky fundraiser hosted by pepe fanhul uh where he you know put out i'm sure thousand dollar a plate lobster and everything else you would expect in Palm Beach, Florida, and they managed to catch him outside and just ask him about working conditions at his Dominican Republic plantation. We find people that basically can't make enough to eat before they go into the fields. I don't believe that. I think that you're looking at other places that are not Central Romana. Find out if that's Central Romana. It was Central Romana.

We were there. The area, but it's probably not Central Romana. In Central Romana, this is the Batay Flumito. So that's it. When you confront Pepe Fanjul with this, when you speak truth to power, he goes, no, that was one of the other slave plantations. That was,

you were looking behind me where there's another slave plantation owned by some other guy that I don't know. Yeah, he pulled the shaggy defense. It wasn't me. We're pretty sure that these people that you're clearly starving are workers that you're not paying. It wasn't me.

Right. The smartest billionaires in the world have come up with the, it was my evil twin defense. No, it wasn't me, Pepe. It was my evil brother, Fefe. Yeah. So this is the new public relations strategy of the smartest and most powerful billionaires on earth. And, you know, look, we didn't even have time to get into all of the negative health effects associated with sugar, how this has been pushed on U.S. consumers, the obesity epidemic, all this stuff. I do want to say very quickly regarding the Everglades, there was a 1991 federal settlement where the Fanhuls were fined $200 million for dumping phosphorus fertilizers into the Everglades for over two decades.

It was creating this blue-green algae in 1986. They were fined $200 million, but the federal government and, you know, by extension, taxpayers ended up spending $2 billion to clean this up. So they were fined very little in terms of the actual cost of cleaning this up. You know, we've mentioned habitat is beginning to has been dying out in the Everglades since at least the 1980s. It continues today. There was a proposal to take 16,000 acres that are owned by the state of Florida and leased to the Fanjuls to grow sugar, the proposal was to take those 16,000 acres and do freshwater reservoirs, put freshwater reservoirs there

to reduce the salt content of the Everglades and reverse this habitat destruction by reintroducing the freshwater flow. The documentary Rotten on Netflix goes through a corrupt governing local body in Florida known as the florida water board in uh 2019 the this land was owned by the state of florida at least to the fan hules until 2019 the florida water board um with one day's notice uh voted to extend the lease to the fan hules uh basically with no public input whatsoever so you know and this is just

something where they're very dominant in local politics and they don't give a fuck if the everglades are around when they're dead uh they've you know there's also health conditions linked to controlled burning and their sugar fields that primarily affect poor communities who are nearby in florida the list goes on and on and on. And one last thing. This is mostly circumstantial. There's no direct link, but Florida was one of the first states to reopen during the coronavirus pandemic. And obviously this wasn't based

on any scientific input. It's pretty well established that a lot of the reopening, early reopenings was from business pressure. And who are the most influential and some of the richest people in Florida exerting that pressure? You've got the Fanuel brothers. And now Florida, I think today, just broke another record for most cases, new coronavirus cases in one day. I'm just surprised something called the Florida Water Board is also torturing Americans.

But yeah, and when we mentioned their control over Florida politicians, I did just want to say briefly regarding Marco Rubio. There's a great article in the Miami New Times. They reported in January 2020 that Pepe Fenjul's grandson is an intern in Marco Rubio's Senate office. They found this because one of Rubio's other staffers put a list of the intern on Twitter, but they accidentally photographed it while they were taking a photo of the Trump impeachment on their screen. And so they find this list that has Pepe Fenjul's grandson on it, and then Rubio's office will not respond to comments so but the the reason for that is just according to the same um miami

new times article marco rubio's rise in politics traces to a spat between the fenjuls and former florida governor charlie christ in 2008 christ announced that he wanted the state to buy back tens of thousands of acres of uh sugar farmlandland and turn the area into wetlands to help beat back pollution in the Everglades, like we were just mentioning. Charlie Crist, the governor, supported this. Big sugar companies, and the Fan Huls in particular, were pissed. And when Charlie Crist ran for the U.S. Senate in 2010, the Fan Huls lavished money on Marco Rubio's Senate campaign. So basically, he got to the senate uh because these guys funded him and they own him he's of course marco rubio has supported

sugar subsidies ever since completely voted with the fun hules on every issue he uh marco rubio told uh the treasure coast newspapers in 2016 quote the fen hules believed in me early on when few others did and i'm grateful for that unquote so if you thought uh marco rubio was kind of a weird manchurian candidate uh the people we've been describing today are the people he's a manchurian candidate for fuck marco rubio huh yes what a fucking leech um the last thing i wanted to mention is kind of trivial in the grand scheme of things but i i do just think it's interesting uh in the 1990s miami airport offered a contract for my minority-owned businesses to uh underwrite a bond issue for about 200 million dollars for miami airport the fun hules actually pitched themselves to this bond issue as a, quote, 95% Hispanic-owned and controlled minority-owned business.

And they got, I think that because of public controversy, they later had to withdraw it. But for a while, they got money from the Miami airport and by extension, you know, taxpayers and public money and all that. guess why i wanted to bring that up is kind of the problem with trying to avoid class in any sort of political context in terms of you know restorative justice or whatever else is when you go let's do minority contracts or let's do whatever else it's going to be the fucking slave owners of whatever designated racial community you want to grab out you You know, it's going to be the people with political access who are always going to be first in line. And this is like generally why my politics tend towards if we're going to have redistribution, let's do it on a class basis rather than pick your identity group kind of basis.

It could be a little bit of both, you know. That's where I stand, I guess. But yeah, if we get to divvy up the airport it should be based on both race and class Sean it took you an hour and 20 minutes but you finally got to the part you said you know what the darkies have had too much I put it at the end so people would turn off

the episode before that alright anything else? I am the number one most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh. Walt Disney, Nike, Google. Now who's going to be the Medici family

and stand up and let me create more? Or do you want to marginalize me until I'm out of my moment? That was the Fenhull brothers to the airport. But we will see if President Kanye finally breaks up Big Sugar, if he has the courage to take on the Fenhull brothers. We will see if their subsidies persist

and if these horrific conditions that they are subjecting their Dominican workforce to persist. But the Funhull brothers, Alfonso and Pepe Funhull, $8 billion. They are paying workers $2 for 12-hour days in the Dominican Republic. And that's where our Halloween candy comes from. So, sleep-type kids. And with that, this has been Grubstakers. I'm Yogi Poliwag. I'm Eddie Palmer.

I'm Steve Jeffers. I'm Sean P. McCarthy. Thanks for listening, and welcome back. Take care of yourselves.