Toxic algae bloom blankets Florida beaches, prompts state of emergency

[Judi Lynn]

31. Fanjuls are monsters. They have abused poor workers forever, been taken to court just in the US

by suffering, broken, abused, mistreated men for whom they made NO adjustments for safety measures forever, keeping their passports so they could not leave, paying them slave wages, forcing them to live in crowded, filthy shacks, putting propaganda literature around their shacks threatening them to not make trouble, allowing no rest time, no water, nothing for these poor men with giant machetes working themselves to death.

Cuba does NOT want them back, they had enough of them so long ago.

For anyone wanting a good long look at these slimy people, here's the Vanity Fair article written about them:

In the Kingdom of Big Sugar

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. In 1989, outraged by what he calls “modern-day slavery,” a crusading 37-year-old lawyer named Edward Tuddenham took them to court, spawning four ongoing class-action suits on behalf of 20,000 former workers. Marie Brenner investigates an epic legal war that pits the Fanjuls’ American Dream against the nightmare of migrant laborers.


by Marie Brenner,

|January 5, 2011 12:00 am

. . .

According to la bola, the rumor mill in Havana, the Gomez-Mena family emulated the French aristocracy and were as oblivious to the conditions in the fields as their 18th-century counterparts. Sugar had controlled the Cuban economy since the 19th century. Of the ruling sugar families, the Lobos were thought of as the most decent, whereas the Gomez-Menas had a reputation for being ruthless. While Alfy and Pepe Fanjul attended dances at the Havana Yacht Club, Cuba’s 500,000 cane cutters virtually starved six months out of the year. In Havana, at the Museo de la Revolución, there are now special display cases showing the brutal conditions in the sugar fields, which helped bring about the fall of the Batista regime.

. . .

Once at a fund-raising dinner with Al Gore, Alfy Fanjul brought up the 20-year, $300 million plan to clean up the Everglades that Big Sugar had committed to in 1994. Gore’s reaction was fast and combative. He appeared irritated that this sugar baron—no matter how much money he had donated—would think that Gore could be massaged in this way. In 1996, Gore had proposed a penny-a-pound “polluter’s tax” to protect the Everglades, and had lobbied to turn 100,000 acres of sugarcane fields back into swampland. The Fanjuls had taken Gore on then, calling the president while he was telling Monica Lewinsky that their relationship was over. They also mounted a counterattack on the penny-a-pound ballot initiative which featured incendiary TV commercials saying that the penny a pound would put sugar farmers out of business.

Sitting at the table that night, Gore began multiplying tons of sugar by 10 cents a pound —sugar was then selling for about 10 cents above the world-market price—and made it clear that he felt Big Sugar had gotten off cheaply. Seemingly unimpressed by Big Sugar’s investment of $300 million over 20 years, Gore asked, “And how much sugar subsidy do you get every year?” “It’s not a subsidy,” Alfy replied. He kept trying to convince the vice president that the $65 million subsidy that enriches Florida Crystals was sensible policy, but when he saw that he was getting nowhere, he retreated into a cold silence.

. . .

He had grown up in a world of bribes, watching his father pay mordidas to President Fulgencio Batista, which, he says, were “the cost of doing business with dictators.” The Fanjuls stayed above the fray of Cuban politics and refused to listen to rumors of Batista’s brutal practice of torturing his enemies. Fanjul senior turned down the dictator’s offer to make him an ambassador. “He was above politics,” says Alfy.

. . .

I ask Cameron what he would say to Alfy Fanjul if he were sitting in the car with us. “I would say to him that he hides from his dirty work. They try to pat you on the shoulder in order to get you to kill the other guy.… Most of their guys in the field are the lead men and the ticket writers. They take them ‘off the knife.’ They know that cutting cane is very hard, so they try to work on the boss’s side. The boss tell them to cheat us, and they say, ‘I have to do my job, man. I have to get away from the slavery.’ … I have seen men working for 30-odd years on the contract. That man is old and shaky. He cannot get up the row as fast as he could.… They use the term ‘car faster than car’—that man is old, I am young, faster than him.

“I have seen young guys who have never cut cane before.… I see guys crying and giving blood and coming out of the field crying because he has nothing on his check.… I have seen guys injured, got cut, and their back pulled out. I have seen them sent home with nothing.…

“Nothing lasts forever. And someday those billionaires are going to die, and they are not going to be able to carry a cent with them. Everyone is going to atone for what he done!”

More:
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2001/02/floridas-fanjuls-200102

I hope someone will take the time to read this article. It is deeply important in the view it gives of what has been going on in the sugar industry, and, in different forms, other industries where the owners have total control, and have stood even above the law for far too long. Thank you.