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EXCLUSIVE: Bill Clinton is seen hanging out with billionaire sugar baron brothers Alfonso and Jose 'Pepe' Fanjul - a one-time friend of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein - after spending the day on 95-ft yacht in Sag Harbor

• Bill Clinton was seen spending time with billionaire sugar baron brothers Alfonso and Jose 'Pepe' Fanjul in Sag Harbor, New York on Tuesday 
• Exclusive photos obtained by DailyMail.com show the former president chatting to old friend and Democratic donor Alfonso, aka Alfy, 84, while Pepe, 77, stood nearby 
• The three were spotted disembarking Alfonso's 95ft boat, Crili, named after his daughters Crista and Lillian
• The brothers, whose Florida sugar and real estate empire is worth $8.2billion, have been close to the Clinton family for decades, with Alfonso co-chairing Clinton's Florida campaign in 1992 
• The Fanjuls have both used some of their wealth to cultivate close political contacts from both parties – with Alfonso courting Democrats and Pepe pursuing Republicans
• Pepe last year attended a $10million fundraiser for Donald Trump at the Peltz mansion in Palm Beach, Florida,  where he would have have donated more than $580,000 to the former president's campaign to secure his invitation
• Just like Clinton, Pepe appeared in late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's 'black book' of celebrity, wealthy and influential contacts
• The younger Fanjul brother was pictured with the billionaire pedophile and his associate Leon Black at a 2005 screening of the movie Capote in New York 
• Clinton has also been scrutinized for his relationship with Epstein, after appearing on flight manifests for the financier's jet, dubbed the 'Lolita Express' 

By Josh Boswell For Dailymail.com

Published: 17:55 EDT, 1 September 2021 | Updated: 05:05 EDT, 2 September 2021

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Bill Clinton was spotted on Tuesday hanging out with two sugar baron billionaire brothers, one of whom was once friends with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein .

The former president, 75, was pictured with influential political donors Alfonso 'Alfy' and Jose 'Pepe' Fanjul disembarking their yacht in the tony town of Sag Harbor, New York.

The brothers, whose Florida sugar and real estate empire is worth $8.2billion, have been close to the Clinton family for decades, with Alfonso co-chairing Clinton's Florida campaign in 1992.

A special prosecutor's report into Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky infamously noted how the president even interrupted his breakup conversation with her to take a 22-minute call from one of the brothers. The affair is the centerpiece of the 10-part FX series Impeachment, which debuts next Tuesday.

Both Clinton and Jose, who goes by the nickname Pepe, appear in late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's 'black book' of celebrity, wealthy and influential contacts.

Birds of a feather: Bill Clinton was spotted rubbing elbows with old friends and sugar tycoons Alfonso 'Alfy' (pictured) and Jose 'Pepe' Fanjul in Sag Harbor on Tuesday 

Exclusive photos obtained by DailyMail.com show the former president hanging out with the Florida sugar baron brothers after spending time on Alfy's (pictured) yacht

The Cuban-born brothers, whose sugar and real estate empire is worth $8.2billion, have been close to the Clinton family for decades, with Alfonso co-chairing Clinton's Florida campaign in 1992. Pepe is pictured center in sunglasses

Clinton was seen talking with Alfy on a boat dock on Tuesday afternoon while Pepe (second from left) 77, stood nearby

The younger Fanjul brother was pictured with the billionaire pedophile and his associate Leon Black at a 2005 screening of the movie Capote in New York.

A spokesman for Fanjul's company Florida Crystals told the Palm Beach Daily News in 2019 that Pepe and Epstein 'obviously knew each other and had some contact in the past. But there isn't any ongoing business or social relationship with Mr. Epstein.'

Clinton has also been scrutinized for his relationship with the late pedophile billionaire, after appearing on flight manifests for Epstein's jet, dubbed the 'Lolita Express' over allegations Epstein molested underage girls on the plane.

In photographs exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com, Clinton was seen talking with Alfonso and taking a white paper Sag Harbor Books bag from ayacht crew member, while Pepe, 77, stood nearby.

Alfonso's boat, Crili, is 95 feet long and named after his daughters Crista and Lillian. The brothers also own a Gulfstream G-IV private jet.

The Fanjuls have used some of their wealth to cultivate close political contacts from both parties - with Alfonso courting Democrats and Pepe pursuing Republicans

Clinton at one point was seen taking a white paper Sag Harbor Books bag from one of the yacht crew as he stepped off the 93-ft vessel 

The pair are seen stepping off Alfonso's boat, Crili, named after his daughters Crista and Lillian. The brothers also own a Gulfstream G-IV private jet

Elder Fanjul brother, Alfonso, 84, has donated to the Clinton Foundation for years, and acted as co-chair of Bill Clinton's Florida campaign in 1992

The Fanjuls were born into pre-revolution Cuba's aristocracy, entertaining the upper crust at their mansion in Havana paid for by their father's sugar business on the Caribbean island - including throwing parties for the abdicated British King Edward VIII and his wife Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor.  

The brothers are believed to have inspired the fictional Rojo brothers, the wealthy sugar tycoons in Carl Hiassen's 1993 crime novel Strip Tease - which was later made into a 1996 movie starring Demi Moore. 

The family fled when Fidel Castro took power and their properties were seized. But they managed to rebuild their empire in Florida, buying up 187,000 acres of farmland in Palm Beach County and importing thousands of mostly Jamaican laborers.

Their companies, which include Domino Sugar, Florida Crystals and ASR Group, now give the Fanjuls an estimated wealth of $8.2 billion according to Bloomberg, and reportedly comprise 40% of the sugar refining industry in the state.

However, their operations have been deeply controversial for decades.

Some of their firms have been fined multiple times for endangering workers.

The Fanjuls faced four class action lawsuits in the 1980s and 1990s representing 20,000 workers who accused them of 'modern slavery' from backbreaking work in their cane fields, cheating on wages, and long days with 15-minute lunch breaks.

Both Clinton and Jose, who goes by the nickname Pepe, appear in late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's 'black book' of celebrity, wealthy and influential contacts. Pepe is pictured with Epstein's alleged procurer Ghislaine Maxwell in 2006

Clinton has also been scrutinized for his relationship with the late pedophile billionaire, after appearing on flight manifests for Epstein's jet, dubbed the 'Lolita Express.' He is pictured speaking with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at the White House in 1993

Lawsuits filed in 1989 by attorney Edward Tuddenham demanded $51 million for years of alleged wage cheating.

In 1992, a Florida judge granted the full award and ruled that the Fanjuls' firms and others had dramatically underpaid guest workers.

But the laborers have struggled against the vast influence of the billionaire brothers.

After first winning their judgment against the giant sugar companies, Tuddenham's cases were later overturned and dragged on for over a decade, leading to unrest among former staff.

The Palm Beach Sheriff's Department have even reportedly resorted to using police dogs to break up protesting workers on a Fanjul property.

The brothers say they built their empire on American values.

'We consider ourselves the classic American success story,' Alfonso told Vanity Fair in 2001. 'We came here and worked very, very hard.'

The Fanjuls have used some of their wealth to cultivate close political contacts from local politicians to presidents from both parties – with Alfonso courting Democrats and Pepe pursuing Republicans.

The Fanjuls were born into pre-revolution Cuba's aristocracy, entertaining the upper crust at their mansion in Havana paid for by their father's sugar business on the Caribbean island. The brothers and their relatives are reported to have donated nearly $4million to federal candidates, parties, and political action committees between 2004 and 2016

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the Fanjuls and their relatives donated nearly $4million to federal candidates, parties, and political action committees between 2004 and 2016.

Last year Pepe attended a $10 million fundraiser for Donald Trump at the Peltz mansion in Palm Beach. To secure his invite the younger Fanjul would have donated more than $580,000 to the Trump campaign.

Pepe was listed as a host at a Trump fundraising event in 2016, and also hosted a Trump fundraiser with then-Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus in the Hamptons in July that year.

Pepe was on Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole's finance committee in 1996, donated to George W. Bush's presidential campaign and backed Florida Republican senator Marco Rubio – earning the Fanjul family an explicit thanks for their support in Rubio's memoir, An American Son.

Pepe has previously come under fire for his tangential connection to the Ku Klux Klan.

His executive assistant, Chloe Black, worked with the Fanjul brother for more than 35 years as a trusted member of their multi-billion dollar sugar operation.

The assistant was the ex-wife of former KKK leader David Duke and later married former KKK grand wizard Don Black, who ran white supremacist website Stormfront. 

Clinton's outing in The Hamptons comes ahead of the much-anticipated premiere of American Crime Story: Impeachment, which chronicles the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Lewinsky (pictured) had a sexual relationship with then-President Clinton as a 22-year-old unpaid White House intern, and the affair led to his impeachment in 1998

Iconic: British actor Clive Owen (left) recreates the infamous moment Bill Clinton (right) addressed the nation claiming he did not have sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky in first full trailer for Impeachment: American Crime Story. Owen's costume fit Clinton down to his red tie, though he was covered with prostheses to adopt the embattled president's distinctive nose and face

Subtle transformation: Unlike her costars, Beanie Feldstein did wear noticeable prosthetics to play Monica Lewinsky. She achieved the former interns recognizable look with a wig and her business clothing

Federal court documents from 1978 list Chloe as the corporate secretary of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

When her connections to the racist organization emerged in a 2010 Southern Poverty Law Center report, Pepe's office told the New York Post he had no intention of firing her. 

Alfonso, 84, has donated to the Clinton Foundation for years, and acted as co-chair of Bill Clinton's Florida campaign in 1992.

In August 2016 Hillary attended a $50,000-per-plate Miami Beach fundraiser held by the elder Fanjul.

The most storied instance of Alfonso's powerful reach was a phone call to President Clinton noted by special prosecutor Kenneth Starr in his report on the Lewinsky affair.

Lewinsky told Starr that Clinton was in the middle of breaking up with her when he took a call from Fanjul.

'The President told her that he no longer felt right about their intimate relationship, and he had to put a stop to it,' the Starr Report said. 'Ms. Lewinsky was welcome to continue coming to visit him, but only as a friend. 

Family affair: The Sopranos star Edie is seen for the first time in character with a young actress playing her daughter Chelsea Clinton 

Friend or foe? Sarah Paulson plays a sinister looking and sounding Linda Tripp, who exposed the affair. The role required extensive makeup and prosthetic effects for her face, and she also wore padding under her costume

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'He hugged her but would not kiss her. At one point during their conversation, the President had a call from a sugar grower in Florida whose name, according to Ms. Lewinsky, was something like 'Fanuli.' In Ms. Lewinsky's recollection, the President may have taken or returned the call just as she was leaving.

'The President talked with Alfonso Fanjul of Palm Beach, Florida, from 12:42 to 1:04 p.m. Mr. Fanjul had telephoned a few minutes earlier, at 12:24 p.m.'

In an interview with Vanity Fair in 2001, Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen suggested the interrupted meeting was far more intimate than Starr portrayed.

'The most telling thing about Alfy Fanjul is that he can get the president of the United States on the telephone in the middle of a b**w job,' Hiaasen said. 'That tells you all you need to know about their influence.'

The brothers have a strong interest in maintaining their political clout, as their companies have taken hundreds of millions of dollars in controversial farming subsidies since the 1990s that have come under attack from politicians including former vice president Al Gore.

A 2014 bill that cut many farm subsidies left a lucrative sugar support program unscathed, leading political commentators to point to the Fanjul brothers' continued influence in Washington.

Share or comment on this article: Bill Clinton seen spending time with billionaire sugar baron brothers Alfonso and Jose Fanjul

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In the Kingdom of Big Sugar

By Marie Brenner

The President told her he no longer felt right about their intimate relationship, and had to put a stop to it.… At one point during their conversation the President had a call from a sugar grower in Florida whose name, according to Ms. Lewinsky, was something like “Fanuli.” In Ms. Lewinsky’s recollection, the President may have taken or returned the call just as she was leaving.

—The Starr Report

Soon after Edward Tuddenham graduated from Harvard Law School in 1978, he took off for West Texas with two classmates to open a legal-aid office in the town of Hereford, located in an onion-and-cotton-growing area between Lubbock and Amarillo. He called his father, a radiologist in Phil- adelphia’s Main Line, to tell him of his decision. “Hereford?” his father asked, then looked up the town in an atlas. “What a surprise, it’s even on the map.” Tuddenham was an anomaly in the Panhandle; he wore frayed Brooks Brothers shirts and Birkenstocks, listened to the Rolling Stones and Neil Young, and had no interest in being hired by New York law firms, which were always eager to recruit the best of the best from every Harvard law class.

Tuddenham had graduated magna cum laude, and he had a vision of himself as a fearless advocate for farmworkers. In junior high school, he had once watched David Susskind interviewing legal-aid lawyers and women on welfare, and his mother, seeing his interest, had said, “This is the kind of work you should do—helping people like that.” By the time he got to Harvard, he had developed a persistent melancholy which caused him to project an ironic detachment. Women were drawn to his aura of romantic self-regard; in his spare time he played Mozart on the piano and made Mission-style furniture. He grew determined to fight for the Mexicans who swam across the Rio Grande to pick cotton in Hereford.

“I had to believe in what I was doing,” Tuddenham tells me to explain his first job. Back then, it was easy for him to believe. The effect of Earl Warren’s liberal Supreme Court was still strong, and public-interest law could change social policy; in 1982 the court would rule that the children of Mexican aliens must be allowed to register in schools. Possessed of a serene and mysterious confidence, Tuddenham decided to take on the cotton farmers of West Texas. He allowed nothing to daunt him. He and one of the other lawyers moved into a house in a former World War II prisoner-of-war compound, where their Mexican clients lived in barracks. A local corn grower called them “the Harvard idiots,” and a sheriff threatened to run them out of town. The day they got to Hereford, the only movie theater there closed. At night there was nothing to do but stare at the weather. The trio opened a storefront, called it Texas Rural Legal Aid, and set out to teach the Mexicans their rights. The farmers hired an assistant district attorney to be their lawyer. One cotton grower held a double-barreled shotgun up to the face of a U.S. marshal who was serving him papers.

The sheriff announced at a local growers’ meeting, “These people are outsiders.… Texas Rural Legal Aid … is supplying these people with information and telling them all about federal laws.” Tuddenham’s clients, who had been weeding the cotton fields, wound up losing their jobs or being deported. The cotton farmers fired them and got local children to spray pesticides with water guns. Then the farmers sued Texas Rural Legal Aid, charging “conspiracy to extort minimum wage.” A local radio station played a song composed by a deputy: “I am for justice and the American way / So get out of Hereford, T.R.L.A.” After the experience in the cotton fields, Tuddenham would always tell his clients, “You can stand up for what is right, but you will probably lose your jobs.” What happened in Hereford would haunt him forever.

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.

Bernard Bygrave, a class representative of Tuddenham’s case, is one of thousands of Caribbean islanders, mostly Jamaicans, who once worked at Okeelanta for Alfy Fanjul and his brother Jose, known as Pepe. As a result of more than a dozen cases filed by Tuddenham and his colleagues, the cane cutters are no longer Fanjul employees, but they are charging in connected class-action suits that the Fanjuls’ companies engaged in cheating them of their rightful wages in a contract which they argue is “a monumental bait and switch.” In May 1992, at the headiest moment in the litigation hell the case has turned into, a Florida judge awarded the workers $51 million in a summary judgment. That moment was fleeting, however, for three years later the decision was reversed on appeal and subsequently broken down into five separate jury trials. Now there are 90 crates of documents in the West Palm Beach courthouse. If nothing else, they provide an encyclopedia of a 50-year American labor scandal. Tuddenham calls the system “modern-day slavery.” The Fanjuls’ lawyers see the case as “a major loss of income to thousands of decent hardworking men.”

Like Henry Flagler, who brought the railroad to Florida and built the town of West Palm Beach for his laborers, the Fanjuls, after fleeing Castro’s Cuba, bought out scores of cattle and vegetable and sugar farmers in the Everglades and created nearly 180,000 acres of sugarcane fields, harvested by Jamaicans they imported under the government’s H-2 program. Cane was harvested by foreign workers because it was such brutal and dangerous work that no Americans would take it. Hour after hour the men chopped cane with machetes and stacked it in the fields. They wore metal arm and shin guards, and had to stoop over agonizingly to chop through stalks as thick as bamboo. Many were allowed only a 15-minute lunch break, to wolf rice down while standing up. Win or lose, the Bygrave cases have a powerful subtext: they are a morality play about the employment of foreign workers with marginal legal rights.

The Fanjuls are formidable adversaries. They control about 40 percent of Florida’s sugar crop, and last year they made contributions to 31 political candidates, giving more than any other sugar power. They deeply resent their nickname: the first family of corporate welfare. Little known to the American public, Pepe and Alfy Fanjul operate within the hidden world of implicit linkage, the grand club of the country’s power brokers, who routinely trade favors like baseball cards. “There is a rule to understanding life in South Florida,” author and Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen tells me. “Alligators don’t give to political campaigns, and the Fanjuls do.” Last year the Fanjuls and Florida Crystals gave $486,000 to Democratic candidates and $279,000 to Republicans. (Alfy, who co-chaired Clinton’s Florida campaign in 1992, is the family’s Democrat; Pepe, who was on Bob Dole’s finance committee in 1996, is the family’s Republican.) “The most telling thing about Alfy Fanjul is that he can get the president of the United States on the telephone in the middle of a blow job. That tells you all you need to know about their influence,” Hiaasen says. At one time, the Fanjuls’ father, Alfonso Fanjul Sr., and their grandfather Jose Gomez-Mena presided over one of the largest sugar holdings in Cuba. “One of the reasons why we get involved in American politics is because of what happened to us in Cuba,” Alfy Fanjul tells me. “We did not get involved in the Batista government, and we do not want what happened in Cuba to happen to us again.”

There is little chance of that. Every few years the Fanjuls and the Florida growers lobby tirelessly for the reauthorization of the sugar program established under the 1981 Farm Bill. Of all the political handouts that campaign money forces through Congress, the sugar program is one of the most controversial. Each year Florida Crystals receives about $65 million in price supports; the Fanjuls’ chief rival, U.S. Sugar, takes in $55 million. Although the price of sugar on the world market is 10 cents a pound, American sugar growers by law are guaranteed 21 cents a pound. When the farmers overproduce—as they did last year—and the price of their crop dives, the government takes the surplus at the guaranteed price and holds it in warehouses.

The sugar program adds $1.4 billion to consumers’ bills and funnels about $560 million back to the growers, Harper’s magazine recently reported. Critics of the program believe that it has outlived its purpose and become a Frankenstein monster that is protected by a coalition of interests: congressmen and senators in both sugar and non–sugar states who rely on donations to finance campaigns, corn farmers who sell their high-fructose syrup to candy manufacturers in order to profit from the elevated cost of sugar, and labor unions that fear sugar jobs could go overseas. In the 42 years since the Fanjul brothers left Havana, they have become shrewd practitioners of the quiet ways of American corporate influence. They remain out of sight.

Although the courtroom is full of Fanjul executives and sugar society for the closing arguments of Bygrave v. Okeelanta, the Crili is the only visible sign of the Fanjuls during the entire trial. “People have spent millions of dollars fighting us. Skywriters even attacked us during the Super Bowl! the fanjuls and the $65 million sugar subsidy!” says Pepe Fanjul. “We consider ourselves the classic American success story,” adds Alfy Fanjul. “We came here and worked very, very hard.”

I am late to court the morning of the closing arguments, and as I walk in, Tuddenham is paraphrasing Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. “A contract isn’t about saying what you meant. It is about meaning what you say.” He looks as if he slept in his green tweed jacket; his hair is askew. Tuddenham is tall and lean and has the distracted air of a wonk from the Roosevelt years. He is standing in front of easels filled with cane-price charts he had made on the cheap at Kinko’s. Invoking the elliptical Holmes for a jury that has sat through three weeks of sugarcane arithmetic provided by economists and industry executives is a sure sign that he is tanking. The courtroom is packed on the defendants’ side with Cuban exiles in expensive suits, aging farm managers, chic women in pastel linens and stiletto heels, and a platoon of young lawyers from Steel, Hector & Davis arguing for the Fanjuls. The plaintiffs’ side is represented by the entire staff of the Migrant Rural Legal Aid office of Belle Glade, all six of them. Their wardrobe is McGovern-rally casual—short sleeves and knapsacks.

“[This case] had been up and down the court system for 10 years.… Nobody could figure out what to do [with it],” Judge Edward Fine will tell the jury. The litigators on both sides have become like partners in a bad marriage, volatile and furious, stripped of the last hint of civility. By not settling years ago, the Fanjuls have generated reams of bad publicity about their business practices. And Tuddenham, in his epic quest to help his migrant clients, may have cost them their jobs.

Seated next to Tuddenham and his principal partner, David Gorman, at the plaintiffs’ table is a Jamaican named Adolphus Gordon, who once worked for the Fanjuls as a cutter. He has been a crucial witness in the trial. In the last moments of his closing argument, Tuddenham turns to Gordon. “Stand up, Adolphus. Let the jury see you. This case is about you.” Tuddenham’s eyes fill with tears. Walking out of the courtroom, he berates himself for this show of emotion, but it is plain that in Gordon’s face he has seen the panorama of the last decade of his own life—the files containing the stories of 10,000 men, the computer disks spelling out the arcana of migrant-worker law, the motions and last-minute appeals, the trips to Jamaica and St. Lucia charged on overextended credit cards.

He has always been sure that a jury would see the exploitation of these laborers as he does—a craven mistreatment of people who have no lobby and no leverage. He believes the trial has gone splendidly. “The beauty of this case is that it is so simple. It is based on a single piece of paper. It is not a complicated case, it is just not an obvious one,” Tuddenham says.

“We were slaves,” Gordon tells me softly. “There was no limit to the amount of work they had us do.”

From the Florida Crystals helicopter it is possible to see all the way to Lake Okeechobee, the shallow bowl of the Everglades which from the air is a vast sea of saw grass and sugarcane. Getting an interview with the Fanjuls is not easy. For months I have been trying to convince Joseph Klock, Flo-Sun’s general counsel and chairman of Steel, Hector & Davis, that it is in his clients’ interest to allow me to examine their side of the Bygrave cases. Klock looks like a young Charles Durning, and is not afflicted with self-doubt; partisan invective is his specialty. Klock’s firm has represented The Miami Herald and Florida Power & Light, and he is the Fanjuls’ closest adviser.

At the height of the Florida recount crisis last year, Katherine Harris turned to Klock to represent her. Immediately people who understand the vast power of the Fanjuls and the sugar lobby began to play connect-the-dots: was Klock’s scorched-earth advice to Harris tacitly dictated by Alfy Fanjul’s dislike of Al Gore’s conservation policies and sugar politics? Gore’s sympathy for Elián González’s Miami relatives did little to win him real affection within the power circles of the Miami Cubans, a community in which Alfy and Pepe Fanjul are the most revered members. They were major supporters of the late Jorge Mas Canosa, the ruthless Miami leader of the anti-Castro movement, who made a fortune in telecommunications and construction in Florida. “I thought Jorge Mas Canosa was a fine human being,” Alfy says. Some people believe the Clinton administration took a tough stance on Cuba in exchange for a donation reportedly close to $75,000 given at a Clinton fund-raiser in Little Havana in 1992. At that moment, Clinton’s relationship with the Miami Cubans was at its coziest. Later, after the Cubans shot down a Brothers to the Rescue plane, Clinton signed the Helms-Burton bill, which tightened the U.S. embargo on Cuba and allowed Cuban-Americans to sue foreign companies using or investing in expropriated properties in Cuba.

During last year’s presidential campaign, Joe Lieberman went to Florida and visited Mas Canosa’s grave, but nothing could calm the anger of the Cubans at the government’s decision to take Elián González from his relatives’ house in an early-morning raid. The Fanjuls, according to someone who knows them well, helped finance the legal strategy of the boy’s Miami relatives, and Pepe, Florida’s most prominent Cuban Republican, has told friends that he was outraged by the F.B.I.’s insensitivity in taking the child at gunpoint. “It paralleled their own experience in Cuba,” the friend says.

In a front-page story on December 1, The New York Times reported the odd chain of phone calls and meetings with influential Republicans which might have caused Miami-Dade’s mayor, Alex Penelas, to use his influence to stop the hand recount in Miami-Dade County. (Penelas denied the charge.) Penelas had been an Al Gore supporter until Elián González arrived in Miami. In the grand game of implicit linkage, power is often exerted subtly and indirectly. Helping George W. Bush get to the White House would be the ultimate favor a self-interested Miami politician could provide. Penelas, who relies on Miami’s Cuban-Republican voting base, understood the feelings of his richest supporters. According to this scenario, it was no accident that Joseph Klock showed up as Katherine Harris’s lawyer. “That is to make sure that there is a safe connection between her and the Cubans,” an insider says. But Klock, as one of the most powerful lawyers in the state, could just as well have been brought in by the other side. “I bet you I don’t like Gore even more than Alfy doesn’t like Gore,” Klock told me on the morning he announced his strategy to stop the Florida recount. “In terms of sugar policy, I get the impression that the industry thinks Gore might be better, but they just can’t stomach him.… For the Farm Bill, I think George W. would be a good president.” Klock maintains that there is no link between his role for the Fanjuls and what he did for the Republicans.

Klock’s invective is often hurled at reporters for Time and Forbes who characterize Pepe and Alfy Fanjul as sugar’s bad boys, milking their soft-money connections to protect their $65-million-a-year subsidy: “ Time is an asshole! I see red when I see the name Forbes. I think it is irresponsible of Forbes [to attack the Fanjuls]—the owners there are conspicuously consumptuous! The only thing Malcolm Forbes did not do with a $100 bill is light a cigar.”

As the Bygrave cases moved through the legal system, Klock was every bit as aggressive as he would be for Katherine Harris a year later. He takes full credit for persuading the Fanjuls to get rid of migrant labor and mechanize their fields. “I told Alfy, ‘Unless you want to move into Belle Glade, drive a pickup truck, and supply cars and two-bedroom apartments to all the workers, get out of this business.’ … The chairman did not want to mechanize the fields. I made him.… When all this started with the workers and they filed a lawsuit, Alfy said, ‘No one in this company cheats workers on their wages. It is against the policy of this company, and I want you to report it to me if it happens.’”

Klock has lost all patience with the tactics of Edward Tuddenham. “He is a crazed ideologue, isn’t he? My nickname for him is the windchill factor. When you are a philosopher king, you understand what is best for everyone in the world. It is unnecessary to be concerned with little details like whether or not people eat! What is important is principle! These guys are the foo-birds.… They want the big glory cases, the law reform, the precedent-setting cases!”

Before I am allowed to interview Alfy and Pepe Fanjul, I am given a tour of their sugar mills and refineries, the now spotless empty barracks of the former H-2 workers, and warehouses stocked with Florida Crystals’ products, especially rice and granulated sugar. There are so many products and varieties, the warehouses seem like a gargantuan A&P. The Fanjuls are justifiably proud of what they have created—it is American industry at its best. Twenty-four hours a day, their refineries pump the brown syrup that is turned into white crystals and bagged and shipped.

Flo-Sun’s offices are in a shopping center with a mock-Tudor front around the corner from the Flagler museum. The Fanjuls are known for their economies. According to Tuddenham, the company’s cost per ton for wages was generally, and remarkably, within a penny or two of what they budgeted. Although Pepe lives in a 30-room mansion near the Breakers, his office is surprisingly simple. The only sign of corporate wealth is the Flo-Sun steward who offers me Cuban pastries on a tray. At my request, Pepe has gathered 1950s photographs of the mansions and farms in Cuba that belonged to the Fanjuls’ father and their maternal grandfather, Jose Gomez-Mena.

The mansion where Gomez-Mena used to live with his wife, Elizarda, is now the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas. With its Palladian balconies, Ionic columns, and rooms preserved in the Louis XV and XVI styles favored by the Gomez-Menas’ decorator, Henri Samuel, the museum is intended to show Cubans how Spanish grandees once lived, surrounded by Staffordshire, Derby, Wedgwood, Sèvres, and Emile Gallé, in vast rooms with themes—Chinese, neoclassical, and English.

On a recent visit to Havana, I asked the young woman guarding the Chinese room, with its deteriorating coromandel screens, about the Gomez-Menas and the Fanjuls. “ Poderoso, ” she said softly, meaning powerful. Boldini’s portrait of Gomez-Mena’s sister the Countess Revilla de Camargo is still in place, but the collection of works by the Spanish painter Joaquin Sorolla has been moved to the National Museum of Fine Arts. The family’s former sugar headquarters, the Manzana de Gomez-Mena, an imposing, block-long Colonial building, is now a mall. Alfy and Pepe’s childhood home in the country-club section of Havana is today one of Fidel Castro’s residences.

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.

Home movies show Alfy’s and Pepe’s lives as young sugar princes, lolling around the swimming pool at their beach house in Veradero. Sent to college in America, they behaved like the caudillos they had been reared to be. In Cuba, society columnists chronicled the parties the Fanjuls threw for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and their golf games with Loel Guinness, but the Fidelistas began to refer to the family openly as “parasites and leeches.” “When I left Havana for the last time, Errol Flynn was on the plane with me with his girlfriend,” Pepe says lightly. The essence of the Fanjul brothers’ lives in exile has been their relentless determination to get back what they lost in Havana.

Pepe and Alfy grew up in the closed world of Havana’s colonial aristocracy. Their grandmother kept clippings from the magazine Social of the costume she had worn to a ball in 1926 where everyone dressed in the style of Watteau. The alliance of Alfy and Pepe’s father and mother brought together two of Cuba’s great sugar fortunes. An only child, Lillian Fanjul warred with her glamorous stepmother, Elizarda, and doted on her five children, Alfy, Lillian, Pepe, Alexander, and Andres. Family members believe that Alfy inherited his mettle from his mother. When Jose Gomez-Mena died in Florida without a will soon after the Fanjuls came to America, Lillian Fanjul told her stepmother coldly, “You don’t deserve any money.… Sell your jewelry—you have a lot of it.”

Pepe Fanjul’s conversation is as light as a meringue. He is a master of moving the dialogue along, an epicene flirt with a mustache who wears cashmere jackets and pastel socks. Pepe and his wife, Emilia, are fixtures on the New York social scene and often play host at the Fanjuls’ Dominican Republic resort, Casa de Campo, with its swimming pools, country club, 5,000-seat theater, and an architectural folly, Altos de Chavon, built to resemble a 16th-century village. Recently, Alfy filed for a divorce there. His wife, Tina, the mother of his children, countersued him in Florida, claiming that his assets were in America. (The divorce was finalized in Florida last year.) In Palm Beach, Pepe lives in a mansion that was formerly owned by the Krupp family, who had manufactured munitions for the Nazis. Each year, during the holidays, he mails out a list of the most social local families, a sort of Palm Beach 200. Pepe is fond of recounting amusing moments from the grand days, going back to the 19th century, when his relatives ruled Havana’s sugar society.

As Alfy Fanjul greets me, he says, “This is the first time I have given an in-depth interview.… We want you to show our side of the issue. I thought it was the time to do it.” He has a short neck, dark eyes, and an expression that is wary and opaque, Bogart-like in its intensity. His polite tone contradicts the palpable emotions churning underneath. He has the old-world manners of a Spanish aristocrat, a cool detachment that indicates he is accustomed to being in control. Seven years older than Pepe, Alfy was the architect of the family’s rise in America. There is about him an atmosphere of throttled energy, of a certitude that is indirect. “I have never seen Alfy emotional on any subject,” Klock says.

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.

By Kase Wickman

By Hillary Busis

By Stephanie Krikorian

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.

The defining moment of Alfy Fanjul’s life came in 1959, when Castro’s rebels threw their machine guns down on the conference table at his family’s headquarters on the Avenida de Gomez-Mena, the Havana street named after his grandfather. The room was decorated with maps indicating the wide sweep of the Fanjul and Gomez-Mena properties, a total of 150,000 acres and 10 sugar mills. “They were trying to explain to us the process of what they were going to do and how they were going to take our property away. They circled a wall map and said, ‘This will be ours. All of it.’” Fanjul was 21 years old and had recently graduated from Fordham University in New York. “I said, ‘This is not the law.’ I was young, but I was not brash.”

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.

It was inconceivable to the Fanjuls that a Communist could ever take over Cuba, no matter how much support he had from the middle class. On New Year’s Eve of 1958, as Alfy and Pepe Fanjul were watching the fireworks at the Havana Yacht Club, word spread through the party that Batista had fled. Soon after, armed militia arrived at the Fanjuls’ house and arrested Fanjul senior. They sealed off parts of the house and commandeered the family’s cars. Alfonso Fanjul was interrogated at police headquarters for hours, until finally a woman appeared and said, “Release him. He has nothing to do with the Batista government.”

That summer Pepe and Alfy Fanjul’s father left for America. He owned apartment buildings in New York, and he was convinced he could wait out the revolution and then return home. Alfy was left in charge of the business. He was persecuted by the Fidelistas, and even shot at in his car. Several times he had to lie down on the floor of his office to get out of the range of gunfire. Warned that he would be killed if he remained at home, he stayed with friends and moved from house to house. “The last day I was in Havana, I went to our house and discovered $10,000 in the safe. I had to decide whether or not to take it. I decided it was too dangerous.”

In New York, Pepe and Alfy’s grandfather told them, “You have an imperative to build up this business again. The money will not last until the next generation.” It was an opportune moment for anyone who understood the sugar industry. After Castro’s victory, the United States embargoed all Cuban sugar and created massive incentives for American production. In Florida, engineers drained thousands of acres of Everglades swamp, and U.S. Sugar, which was based in Clewiston, expanded rapidly. The Fanjuls settled in Palm Beach, and Alfy looked around for sugar mills to buy. He found three dilapidated plants in Louisiana and, after enlisting two partners, acquired them for $165,000. The Fanjuls had the plants dismantled and taken by barge to Osceola Farms, a 4,000-acre parcel of land in the Everglades. In 1959 the sugar industry in Florida was relatively small. But new types of cane and improved fertilizer were changing all that. Alfy Fanjul set up an office in a deserted schoolhouse, downwind from the plant. “The smell and the dust blew in for months,” he says. Their first crop, in 1961–62, brought in $1 million, but the second year there were floods. “We lost everything and then some,” Alfy recalls.

“What really made this thing take off was the development of the farmworkers program,” he continues. 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 cane. Workers who could not cut fast enough were often labeled “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 Fanjuls expanded their acreage through the Everglades. “I would lease land from anyone I could,” Alfy says, “but I always insisted on an option to buy the property. We were producing raw sugar and would sell it to anyone who would refine it.”

“For years we operated under the radar,” Pepe Fanjul tells me. They settled in Palm Beach, where many grandees such as Earl E. T. Smith, once the ambassador to Cuba, lived. Sugar had captivated the imagination of other ambitious men, most notably Charles Bluhdorn, the self-made, eccentric Austrian who had created Gulf & Western, the conglomerate that owned Paramount Pictures and a string of other companies. Bluhdorn’s office was in the G&W building on Columbus Circle in New York. During the filming of The Godfather in 1971, Paramount executives would walk in and try to discuss business with Bluhdorn, but he would just stare at his Quotron stock machine and make calls to trade sugar futures. His favorite venture was his South Puerto Rico Sugar company. “I watched him ride sugar up to 65 cents a pound,” recalls Barry Diller, a former chairman of Paramount. “In one day he sold all his positions—$150 million.” But sugar was a political football, and it was subject to the ups and downs of the world market. Since the Depression, Congress had set import quotas to protect American sugar farmers. Okeelanta, a subsidiary of South Puerto Rico Sugar, controlled 90,000 acres of sugar property in South Florida and 240,000 acres in the Dominican Republic. When Bluhdorn visited Nixon in the White House, he hammered him to raise the Dominican Republic’s sugar quotas, former commerce secretary Pete Peterson, now the chairman of the Blackstone Group, recalls.

In 1974 a price spike drove the sugar industry 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. If market prices fell short, farmers could make more money if they forfeited their crops, and it suddenly became clear to the Fanjuls—and every other potential sugar grower—that you could not lose if you converted cattle or vegetable acreage to sugarcane. In 1983, Charles Bluhdorn suddenly died of a heart attack. Gulf & Western was taken over by his second-in-command, Martin Davis, whose ferocious dealings with competitors and love-hate relationship with his mentor had been a staple of business reporters in the 1970s. One of Davis’s first big decisions was to unload Bluhdorn’s sugar holdings. “We all got together and tried to figure out how to put this up for sale,” says a lawyer close to Bluhdorn who had begun to read exposés on the sugar business and had gone down to look at the cane cutters’ barracks and found them “one degree short of Dachau.” “Then in one day walked Mr. Alfy Fanjul, a young man from Florida,” the lawyer says. “He floored us with his expertise.”

One former Paramount executive remembers Alfy Fanjul differently. “He sat in a room and negotiated with Marty Davis and the company and simply stole it. It was like watching Minnesota Fats walking away with the pot.” Pepe Fanjul recalls being left “for days” at a hotel, waiting for Martin Davis to give them their first audience. When they arrived at Gulf & Western, they noticed that half the offices on the elite top floor were empty. Davis told him, “Those were my enemies. I got rid of them when Charlie died.” Fanjul had leveraged $240 million to acquire the Gulf & Western holdings that included Okeelanta. “That put us on the map,” Pepe Fanjul tells me. By 1990, Florida Crystals had more acreage than U.S. Sugar, and at Casa de Campo in the Dominican Republic, Harper’s reported, the Fanjuls entertained a Bush-administration official. “My father spent the last years of his life trying to figure out how to get to Cuba, but I knew that our future lay in understanding American politics,” Alfy Fanjul says. Today, the Dominican Republic has the largest foreign quota of sugar exported to the U.S.—17 percent—and, not surprisingly, the Fanjuls’ Dominican subsidiary is the largest private exporter of Dominican sugar.

In the 90 cartons of material Tuddenham has accumulated in the Bygrave litigation, there are depositions from hundreds of former cane cutters alleging mistreatment in the fields. The Fanjuls’ fields were run by farm managers whose job it was to meet a budget set at the beginning of the season. While I am with Alfy Fanjul, I read him an excerpt from one of the workers, Elvis Porter:

Porter: “I work eight hours, and when I went in, I will see six hours and Code One which I don’t—I never refuse.”

“What was Code One?”

“Code One signify refuse.”

“Did you talk to your ticket writer?”

“Yes … I asked him, ‘Say boss, how did I get Code One today? I did not refuse.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’”

Alfy Fanjul’s face remains impassive. “From my point of view, none of this makes sense. The purpose of the program was an incentive.” Then his voice changes and he declares, “I am convinced we didn’t do anything wrong.… My conscience is totally clean.” Jorge Dominicis, the Fanjuls’ spokesman, interrupts him: “All of these workers have been coached.” Fanjul nods agreement. He radiates a caudillo’s lack of interest in the substance of what I have read him, as if Elvis Porter’s testimony were beside the point.

“We believed for the West Indians it was the best job they could get,” he tells me. “It made them middle-class in their countries.”

Earlier, Klock had said, “Is it possible that some people were accidentally shorted? Yes. It’s wrong. Did we say that we were going to pay them by the ton and then cheat them? No.” As I leave, Dominicis brings in a small bag of sugar that sells for $1.60 in England—twice what it would sell for in America because of trade restrictions imposed by the European Union. “We wish we could get that kind of money for our sugar,” Pepe Fanjul says.

Every November for nearly 50 years—from 1944 to 1993—about 10,000 workers arrived in South Florida from the Caribbean to harvest the cane. The season lasted until March, and the work was so dangerous that one in every three missed a day or more of work due to an injury. Some lost fingers and eyes. The mucky ground made machine-harvesting impractical, and until the last year of the program there were no time clocks in the fields. Under a formula that was supposed to comply with minimum-wage standards, the workers were paid not by the hour but by the task—or the amount of cane they cut on a row. Each day the price was determined by the foreman, who insisted that pricing the rows was highly subjective, and that it depended on how thick the cane was, how wet the ground was, how the cane grew in the field.

Jamaicans swore that their hours were routinely shorted by the ticket writers, who reported to the field bosses. Sometimes, they alleged in depositions, they were paid for only four hours when they had worked the entire day. Often the Jamaicans cut 10 or more tons of cane a day. “The row price should have been set high enough so that everyone would make the minimum wage,” says Tuddenham, but thousands were paid as little as $25 a day, about half the minimum wage. However, whatever they made, it was much more than they could make at home. At the end of the season, a cane cutter could take back enough money to buy the cinder blocks for a house. From all over Jamaica, men flocked to Kingston every year hoping to pass the physical exams that would permit them to go to Florida and work for Big Sugar.

*Dear Fatty,

How keeping? I hope all of you are well. I write you and send you $26. I don’t know if you get it.… You wouldn’t know what I’m going through. We get a cane row for $30. It takes 2 days to cut it. That works out to be some one dollar and some cents an hour. I spoke to the timekeeper … and he’s ready to eat me up. He says we just have to work fast enough and then we’ll make even more than the hourly wages they promised us. Imagine! To leave Jamaica, so many hundreds of miles, to come to America and work for one dollar and some cents an hour! Please, don’t tell Claudette what I’ve written. I don’t want her to worry, or think I’m coming home without anything.*

—Letter from a Jamaican cane worker.

Before leaving Jamaica, the H-2 workers were handed a one-page contract which said that they would be paid by the task system. In order to obtain a temporary visa for a worker, the sugar companies were required to file a document called a “clearance order” with the Department of Labor. No worker ever saw the clearance order, but it contained a concise description of the job: A worker “would be expected to cut an average of 8 tons of harvest cane per day throughout the season.” That simple sentence, and the fact that it can be interpreted in myriad ways, is the reason the Bygrave case has been going on for 12 years. Can the language of expectation—eight tons in eight hours—be interpreted as a worker’s right to receive $5.30 (which was the hourly minimum wage) per ton? Eight tons is an immense amount of sugarcane—16,000 pounds of stalks that are 10 to 15 feet high. By comparison, harvesters at the Fanjul sugar farms in the Dominican Republic were paid about $1.50 per ton and cut two or three tons per day, according to The Wall Street Journal. Sometimes the workers in America would cut close to two tons of cane an hour. In those cases, Big Sugar’s lawyers have argued, they were paid more. “We had an incentive system,” Alfy Fanjul tells me. “The more they cut, the more we paid.”

Klock says about the productivity standard, “No, no, no. The language of eight tons is language of expectation, not productivity requirements.… The Feds wanted us to write a description that was somewhere between reality and a worst-case scenario.”

Edward Lazear, a Stanford economist who is considered a leading authority on pay systems, analyzed the records of scores of crews employed by the Fanjul companies. In many cases, whole crews were recorded as having worked only four-hour days; it was almost as if they were on strike. Lazear, who is an expert witness for Tuddenham, is so convinced by the evidence in the case that he has stopped taking money for his services. Joseph Klock says, “They say that the experts’ game is a whore’s game. You can probably get one to say anything.”

Tuddenham believes workers should have been paid $5.30, the hourly minimum wage, for every ton of cane cut. He has calculated that the workers were in fact paid an average of about $3.70 a ton, and is adamant that the growers’ budgets were designed to meet only that amount. That doesn’t mean every worker every day, but over eight years, with 20,000 workers, the original lost-wages claim in the case was about $100 million.

Big Sugar’s dark history of labor controversy has been investigated by congressional committees, by documentary-film makers such as Stephanie Black in H-2 Worker in 1990, and most vividly by Alec Wilkinson in Big Sugar, which first ran as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1989. In the 1940s, the government brought charges against U.S. Sugar, accusing it of violating “the right and privilege of … citizens to be free from slavery”—an allegation not often made since the Civil War. The charges were dropped when a judge ruled that the jury had been illegally selected. Soon after that, sugar companies in Florida were given permission to import “guest workers” from the Caribbean for the cutting season. In 1973, Solomon Sugarman, then a Department of Labor wage-and-hour analyst, led a team investigating working conditions in the fields. He discovered, he tells me, “a pattern of flagrant labor violations.”

Sugarman visited four growers and reported that at U.S. Sugar and the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative the cutters were often counted as having started work 30 minutes later than their actual arrival time in the fields; similarly, there were examples of cutters quitting at 3:35 p.m. but being marked as having stopped cutting at 3. Sugarman reported that at the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative the hours were issued “on the basis of satisfaction of the task.” He discovered that at one company three ticket writers were in fact asleep on the buses that carried workers to the fields. “They knew the bosses would change the tickets anyway,” Sugarman tells me. Sugarman’s report, filed while Nixon was president, had “incontrovertible value” in “that it documented the shaving of hours,” according to Wilkinson. Sugarman, like Tuddenham, quickly learned what happens when you take on Big Sugar. The Department of Agriculture, traditionally friendly to the sugar companies, soon issued its own report, exonerating Big Sugar.

In 1983, however, a congressional report criticized Big Sugar’s labor practices and pointed out that “foreign workers … can be summarily dismissed and sent home, never to return to the United States, for the slightest infraction or sign of organized protest over wages and working conditions.”

April is the end of sugar-harvesting time in Belle Glade. Located 90 minutes from the mansions of Palm Beach, the town celebrates with Bake-Offs and a pageant for Harvest Queen. Belle Glade is one of the poorest communities in America. Edward R. Murrow chose it for his 1964 documentary, Harvest of Shame, and the Peace Corps used to send volunteers there to train. In the spring, the air is often thick with smoke and ash, because sugar farmers burn off the cane leaves in the fields. The smoke was the first thing that Sarah Cleveland noticed when she arrived in 1994 to take a job as a lawyer at Florida Rural Legal Services—that and the alligators that would lurch out of canals and ponds by the cane fields. The ash and the alligators are still noticeable five years later when Cleveland and I visit Belle Glade together.

When Cleveland saw Harvest of Shame, she says, “I was amazed at how similar the conditions were. If anything, it was worse, because Murrow filmed white American farmworkers, and now Belle Glade had immigrants who could be deported with no access to lawyers.”

Touring the workers’ barracks back then with her boss, Greg Schell, Cleveland saw signs posted: beware of legal services. they are not your friends. Schell was circulating a newsletter explaining the workers’ right to have lawyers. “Most of the workers were scared to take it,” Cleveland recalls. “They refused to make eye contact.” She was horrified by the squalor.

Cleveland had been a sophomore at Brown University when she learned about the conditions in migrant farmwork. She was studying the politics of the legal system with Professor Edward Beiser when a Danish photographer came through Providence with a slide show he called “American Pictures,” which showed the terrible state of America’s underclass. That slide show set Cleveland on a journey that would ultimately take her to Belle Glade in 1994 to work for Schell, an expert on migrant-worker litigation and a brainy oddball with a ferocious committment to farmworkers. In the early years of his career, in Maryland in the late 80s, Schell had targeted the apple industry, filing a class-action suit against the growers who were found to have underpaid apple pickers—a case that foreshadowed Bygrave.

Schell did not have to look far to find Edward Tuddenham, who was then spending two weeks a month on a sofa in the Washington office of the Migrant Legal Action Program, scouring migrant workers’ contracts to help legal-aid lawyers around the country. His specialty was the H-2 temporary-foreign-workers program, and he was often on the telephone with lawyers from Idaho to Maryland. He was 36 and had complicated relationships with women; his girlfriends would call the office to make sure that he really lived there. He used the office shower and ordered dinner from the local takeout. Focused at that time on the apple growers of the eastern states, he found a kindred spirit in Schell, who had also gone to Harvard and who had taken off in 1979 for the citrus groves of Florida in a $300 car. The son of wheat farmers, Schell later said of himself that he had “the Peace Corps in his heart” and remarkable moxie. Married to the daughter of a migrant worker whose family had prospered sufficiently to run a camp for workers, he once even brought a lawsuit against his cousin for labor violations.

In Ronald Reagan’s Washington, Schell and Tuddenham were at war with the Department of Labor, which had backed away from a 10-year-old position on how workers got paid—the productivity standard—and sided with growers on issues ranging from wage rates to workmen’s compensation. The department had been wrestling with this issue for years. When Jimmy Carter was in the White House, his secretary of labor, Ray Marshall, fought for enforceable pay standards for the guest-workers program. Marshall was from Louisiana and knew sugarcane and farmwork; he was not fooled by what he viewed as the smoke screens put up by the sugar companies. “They will make people work forever and scared and hard, and that is pretty much what they did anyway,” he recalls. During his tenure, he had hoped to confront agriculture in a big way, but he was warned that he could spend his entire four years fighting just the sheep ranchers of Utah and Nevada—that’s how powerful the agriculture lobby was. Marshall did try, however, to lobby for standards in South Florida, believing, he tells me, that the growers should not be allowed to stand over the workers and tell them, “‘Unless you cut to this place in an hour, you are out of here. And if you are out of here, you are out of the country.’ … You could blacklist them!”

For Marshall, the question in Florida was simple: “Should we require the American workforce to have to compete with people who are prime-working-age males who are forced by the circumstances to work scared and hard? And my answer is no.… I talked to the president, and he agreed. He said that he was opposed to the continuation of the foreign-workers program. Our Constitution does not do much to protect temporary workers.” It was Marshall’s intention in a second Carter administration to make the workers permanent residents, because he understood immigration history. “First you get the young, unmarried people, then you get families, then preachers and cooks. Once you get to that point, then you have a community.”

The sugar companies soon figured out a way around the Labor Department’s attempt to make sure that the piece rate—the number of bushels of apples picked or rows of cane cut—would conform to minimum-wage standards. They offered complex explanations for their pricing methods. “People had been asking this same question for 40 years: How were the fields priced? The sugar companies were masters of obfuscation,” Tuddenham recalls. “You would think they were the Picassos of row pricing. They would say, ‘We eyeball a row of cane and we just know: Fifty-five dollars a row! Sixty-three dollars a row!’”

Schell and Tuddenham determined that the apple pickers in nine states were being underpaid by as much as 40 percent, and they brought a class-action lawsuit in federal court on this issue. A Republican judge, Charles Richey, ruled in their favor and awarded the workers $5 million. Five years later he ruled again, this time against Big Sugar. In a scathing opinion, he wrote that the Department of Labor had bent over backward to avoid enforcing the productivity standard for sugar. A court of appeals concluded, however, that this was a matter for a state court, not a federal court, so from then on Tuddenham would have to wrestle with the legal machinery of Palm Beach County, in the very heart of the sugar belt.

Of all the lawyers Greg Schell could have found to assist him, Sarah Cleveland seemed an emissary of destiny. The daughter of a Birmingham Social Security judge who had clerked for Supreme Court justice Hugo Black during Brown v. Board of Education, and of a prima ballerina at the National Ballet of Washington, Cleveland had inherited her mother’s willowy build and her father’s passion for social justice. At Yale Law School, she was part of a group that filed a case on behalf of the Haitian boat people, which ultimately went to the Supreme Court. She spent hours on the telephone with Schell, who had come to New Haven to recruit for the Belle Glade office.

He had plenty to talk to her about. Six years earlier, a Fort Lauderdale reporter had called Schell to say, “Something bad is going down at Okeelanta. Something crazy.” On November 22, 1986, a squad of Palm Beach County police in riot helmets with attack dogs had taken on a crew that refused to accept the pay conditions in the Fanjul fields. Some 100 cutters from St. 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 the Okeelanta 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 other parts of the property—all were sent back to the islands. They were not even given time 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,” Schell later recalled, “and they had bought household goods to take home. All of it was left behind.”

Reports of the “dog war,” as it came to be called, drifted through the newsrooms and law schools of America. Sarah Cleveland was enraged when she heard of it in New Haven in 1990. By then she had spent two years at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, studying British colonial African and Indian history. The dog war conjured up 19th-century slaves, the workforce the original Spanish sugarcane planters had imported to Cuba. “It honed me in some way toward sugarcane and the plight of these workers,” she later said.

Meanwhile, after their apple triumph in Judge Richey’s court, Tuddenham and Schell had begun to zero in on the closed world of sugar. But when they attempted to speak to workers in the Florida camps, they were met by frightened stares.

The sugar companies tried to swat down the mounting attack on their labor practices by Tuddenham, Schell, and Jim Green, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer in West Palm Beach. Tuddenham understood that they would need a Florida contract-law specialist to argue his tonnage claim in the state courts, but he began taking depositions at the Labor Department and searching for evidence of violations of labor law to back up his belief in the one-ton-per-hour pay standard. Tuddenham drove to West Virginia after Garry Geffert, a local lawyer, found two migrant workers, Canute Williams and Bernard Bygrave, who had cut cane in Florida. At last Tuddenham could spend hours hearing stories of what had actually gone on in the sugar fields. Williams and Bygrave would later testify about the hour shorting, the lack of medical attention, the meager meals. Bygrave would become a class representative on the case, along with Williams and three others. Tuddenham would need hundreds more depositions, but he could not get near the fields. Jamaicans were shipped home on the last day of the harvest, and the sugar companies would not provide employee lists. “You could always tell the Jamaicans, because they were so terrified to talk to us,” says Schell.

By 1989, Tuddenham had enlisted David Gorman, a graduate of Cornell Law School. A Vietnam veteran who rode a Harley and had no history of public-law work, Gorman was certainly not an idealist, but he happened to be a specialist in Florida contract law. “He understood it in two minutes,” Tuddenham recalls. “Intellectually I thought it was interesting,” Gorman says. “How many people that know the system here would have assumed that the cane cutters were well treated in the first place? I got involved because I believed that the tonnage agreement meant what it said, and because these were people who were disenfranchised and had no political clout and who got screwed.”

At the first deposition, Gorman asked a U.S. Sugar manager, “How wide is a row of cane?” Tuddenham and Schell laughed at his naïveté, but, as Tuddenham now admits, “it turned out to be the key to the case. The answer was that you could measure a row by five-feet centers. The row of cane is only an inch or two wide. Then it is five feet to the next row.” Gorman hypothesized that with this precise measure the tonnage of a field could be computed, and he believed he could prove that the sugar companies were violating the language of the clearance order. The question would remain whether the clearance order would hold up as a binding contract in court.

By the end of his first year, Gorman, like Tuddenham and Schell, was set on a path that would change the course of his life, and his motivation deepened as he became aware of how the sugar companies had maneuvered their way through the intricacies of government politics. The lawyers say they were astonished by the level of indifference the Departments of Labor and Agriculture displayed at the treatment of the foreign workers, and they were incensed over a strategy engineered in 1988 by the sugar companies. In 1986, the U.S. government began offering an amnesty that permitted an agricultural worker to get a green card if he had worked 90 days in the United States. Having a green card meant that a cane worker could opt to do construction work or pick apples instead and still remain in the country.

In response, concerned that they would lose their workforce, the sugar companies showed their political muscle in Washington by fighting for an exemption that would deprive their workers of green cards. Their argument was flimsy: they claimed that sugarcane was not “a perishable.” At the Department of Agriculture, Al French, a labor consultant, weighed in on the final decision to exclude the cutters from the program. French, who is from South Florida, had a long relationship with the sugar growers. For years he had worked at the Florida Farm Bureau, and his father had been one of the original architects of the program to bring Bahamian workers to South Florida to work in the fields. In the 1960s, he had worked for the Management Research Institute, a farm-management consulting business run at the time by Rafael Fanjul, the uncle of Pepe and Alfy. French has always maintained that the charges against the growers were overstated. “I don’t think the cutters have such bad labor conditions,” he once told The Wall Street Journal.

This seemed to be one more case of connect-the-dots. Reporters soon theorized that the sugarcane-exemption order had come from the White House. “It was one of the most outrageous things they ever did,” Tuddenham declares. “Workers who had worked all over agriculture were given green cards, and sugarcane workers weren’t.”

In the two years the amnesty program did apply to sugarcane workers, however, scores of them had managed to get other jobs with their temporary green cards, and that allowed them to remain in America. It was from these men that the first stories of what went on in the sugar fields began to trickle out of Palm Beach County, and among them was Bernard Bygrave, who had made his way to West Virginia to pick apples. Irate that their friends and families had been denied green cards or had been deported in the dog war, these former Big Sugar employees slowly began to talk.

Tuddenham, meanwhile, wrote letter after letter to the Departments of Labor and Agriculture, insisting that they had a responsibility to enforce the piece rate in sugar. The department heads would write back and say that the sugar companies used a task rate, not a piece rate. “What is the difference?” Tuddenham demanded, but he got nowhere until Richey ruled in his favor and said he should be able to depose the sugar companies to find out how cane workers were paid. This took almost two years. The team of lawyers allied against Big Sugar was now a loose confederation fighting a war on several fronts. Schell and Tuddenham sent out thousands of letters asking anyone who had worked in sugar to write to them, and soon hundreds of letters began to arrive, postmarked St. Lucia, Trinidad, Jamaica.

*Dear Mr. Schell:

I received your letter. 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 except their terms.

On several occasions I heard some of the workers ask the ticket writer for their 8 hours on the ticket and they were sent back home. If they didn’t sent them back home them, the next time.…

Another thing when you get sick or hurt on the job you had to still work or the worker had to give the company the first 7 days free without pay.

After the 7 days was up, they paid you just $18 a day instead of the amount for 8 hours. Sometimes we worked up to 12 hours, and we only got $18 for it.

Whenever you get cut, you go to the doctor, get it stitched and 2 days afterwards you have to go back to work not matter how bad the cut was.… This is only a few things that went wrong.…*

—Letter from a Jamaican cane cutter.

From the beginning of Bygrave, Edward Tuddenham had a problem: he had no ticket writers who would come forward and confirm shorting in the field. “At that time the ticket writers were still working for Big Sugar and wouldn’t tell us the truth,” Greg Schell tells me. “After they mechanized the fields, it was ‘let my people go’ time.”

They therefore made a decision that ultimately put the case at risk: Tuddenham would fight the sugar companies with contract law. Sifting through the archives storeroom of the legal-aid office, he discovered a letter written in 1972 by Fred Sikes, of the Florida Sugar Producers Association. “It was,” he says now, “the ‘Eureka!’ moment.” Sikes’s letter, written to the Department of Labor, said, “We will require all cutters to produce approximately one ton of cane per hour.”

But in depositions, no one would admit to using a standard of tons in the field. “No matter how many times you would ask, you could never get a straight answer,” says Tuddenham. So he shifted his focus and theorized that the mills were the center of the operation. “We have to feed the mill,” one official told him. “And that means we need a certain number of tons every single day.” That was better than nothing, but still it was pretty weak. The growers, however, were beginning to get a sense of how dogged Tuddenham and his group were.

Back in 1988, Tuddenham had been startled to get a phone call from Edward Fountain, a former supervisor at U.S. Sugar. Fountain had moved to North Carolina but had taken with him documents which, Tuddenham recalls, “basically confirmed what we were piecing together. It was a tonnage-based system. He kept meticulous records. What the estimates were. The cane that was burned. What the actual tonnage turned out to be. He claims to have been told: You have to stay ahead of the workers. You are supposed to be getting more tons than you are paying for.” “I even showed proof where they were shorting,” Fountain tells me. “In one year, my crew was shorted 11,000 tons. It makes me mad—$50,000 would have made such a difference in their lives. The sugar companies are all the same.” Fountain eventually decided to give Tuddenham an affidavit. “He was an Anglo from Belle Glade sticking his neck out for a black Jamaican,” Tuddenham says. “Never in your wildest dreams would you have imagined that.”

Contract law is a fundamental of Western democracies, but the argument made by Tuddenham and Gorman would seem contradictory to almost any jury: The document that no worker saw is nonetheless legally binding. Judges, however, are used to dealing with complicated legal parlance, and in August 1992, Judge Lucy Brown ruled in the Bygrave case that Tuddenham and Gorman’s 20,000 clients were owed $51 million in lost wages. Three years later, a Florida appeals court reversed Brown’s decision, saying that the facts were in dispute, and eventually Bygrave was divided into five separate cases.

The potential testimony from cane cutters in jury trials could have become a public-relations catastrophe for U.S. Sugar, and in 1998 the company settled the case and paid the cutters $5.1 million.

As Tuddenham and Gorman prepared to fight Bygrave in the state courts, they hoped that the administration of Bill Clinton would remove the legal stalemate they were confronted with at the Department of Labor. “If they had said it was a productivity standard, it would have been the end of everything. We would have won,” Tuddenham says. Although the standard was not enforced, all through the Reagan administration and most of the Bush administration the Department of Labor had made its position clear: the eight-ton statement was a productivity standard. Additionally, in a separate ruling, an administrative judge said that U.S. Sugar did in fact pay by the ton, and that the eight tons was a productivity standard. As soon as Bygrave was filed in 1989, however, the Department of Labor, according to Tuddenham, “got second thoughts. Then Clinton is elected. We think, Oh great! The secretary of labor under the last Democratic president was Ray Marshall. He had been consulting at the White House. We thought, Fabulous!” Tuddenham got Marshall to work on the case, and, like Lazear earlier, Marshall worked pro bono.

Marshall went to Clinton’s secretary of labor, Robert Reich, and got, he tells me, the cold wind that blew from the sugar lobby of the early Clinton years. “I am looking at this issue,” Reich told him at a meeting, but, Marshall recalls, “the impression I got was that he was not looking at it.” Marshall’s intuition, based on his own years at the Labor Department, was that Reich had been sandbagged by his staff or by the White House. “There was no pressure from the White House,” Reich tells me. “I did not get involved in legal cases. And if I thought that a sugar company was putting pressure on us, I would have hit them harder.” In his memoir, however, Reich is sharply critical of the swirl of soft money that tainted the Clinton White House. He does not mention the Fanjuls, but in the 1992 election cycle, Big Sugar donated $1.2 million to Democratic candidates.

At Steel, Hector & Davis in Miami, Elizabeth du Fresne attempted to talk sense into Greg Schell as a step toward settling all the sugar cases weighing down her desk. Du Fresne, the daughter of a citrus grower, worked with Joseph Klock, and the two considered Schell, Gorman, and Tuddenham one grand annoyance. Du Fresne, who had started her career at Florida Rural Legal Services, had once even written a brief attempting to get lawyers into the camps. However, since her idealistic days at Vanderbilt University, when she dreamed of working with her idol, Edward R. Murrow, on The Voice of America, she had moved on to being a litigator and eventually representing the Fanjuls. Du Fresne, a pragmatist who has made *The National Law Journal’*s best-trial-lawyers list, is voluble and likes to show off a jawbreaker aquamarine-and-diamond ring she bought when she won a $222.5 million settlement for Florida Power & Light. (Ironically, in that case she was pitted against Fanjul affiliates.)

“In the 1980s, the Fanjuls had a theory: You don’t suck up to the media,” du Fresne tells me. “U.S. Sugar had a different, go-out-and-suck-their-ass approach.” Du Fresne looked down the years that she would have to fight with Schell in court and finally decided to attempt a solution. “Everyone was painted with the same brush, and it was a brush that came from the 1960s,” she says. Since Schell and Tuddenham had started their separate campaigns, du Fresne had been fending off a dozen cases under four umbrella suits. One of them, a wage-claim case concerning guaranteed payments at Okeelanta, was already at the court of appeals; transportation cases, improper-wages cases, and the dog-war case were all grinding through the system. Hovering over Schell’s load was the Bygrave case, which had just been reversed in the appellate court. “I am targeting the sugar industry,” Schell had told her on the telephone. In a spirit of conciliation, du Fresne decided to get together with him. “I said to Joe and Alfy, ‘Let me meet with him. I am ex-legal-services. We want better conditions, they want better conditions. Let me see if I can straighten this out.’”

She drove to West Palm Beach on a Saturday. “I said, ‘Greg, at the current cost of defending these lawsuits, the choice will be made very soon. The cost of defending pointless lawsuits will make our decision to mechanize an easy one.’ He said, ‘I don’t care. You have brought in foreign laborers and exploited them. When you do that, all you do is depress the market for American workers. If you mechanize, you mechanize. I don’t believe you ever will. You like the system too much.’” As Schell recalls it, “At one point when we were arguing—maybe that day, maybe on the telephone—I said to Elizabeth, ‘You know, it is so interesting what money will do.’”

Du Fresne drove back to Miami. “I don’t think we are ever going to be successful with him,” she told the Fanjuls. “I think we have to choose our battles. The ones that are going to cost more to fight, I think we will have to mediate.”

Du Fresne especially wanted to settle Bygrave, and she set up a mediation with David Gorman. Both lawyers call the day and a half of wrangling “a fiasco.” “At the end of it, I asked David Gorman in the hall if he would settle for $7 million. That would have been a bargain, considering what this case ultimately cost,” says du Fresne. Gorman said no.

“We always knew whoever settled Bygrave first would settle cheap, and it would be a war chest for Tuddenham and Gorman,” said du Fresne later of U.S. Sugar’s $5.1 million settlement of the Bygrave litigation. Du Fresne went to see Alfy Fanjul. “I said, ‘Why don’t we settle first? It will be a lot cheaper than going to trial.’ He said, ‘Did we do anything wrong?’ I said, ‘This is a bullshit case. You did not do anything wrong.’ He said, ‘How much is it going to cost to defend it? If we did not do anything, I would prefer not to settle, but I am a rational businessperson.’”

Lawyers often trade stories of sprawling civil actions, cases such as Motorola and IBM, that stretch on for years. The standard for public-interest law has always been the Attica case, filed in 1974 to collect damages for inmates harmed as a result of a riot at a prison in upstate New York. As with Bygrave, the basis of it was the treatment of an underclass. Joseph Klock and his colleagues at Steel, Hector & Davis now refer to Edward Tuddenham as “Schlichtmann,” comparing his doggedness for the cane workers to Jan Schlichtmann’s campaign against W. R. Grace for the toxic waste that led to leukemia and death for several children in Woburn, Massachusetts—the basis of Jonathan Harr’s compelling book, A Civil Action. “I read A Civil Action for the first time just before the Atlantic trial,” Tuddenham says, “and I got so ill from it and what happened to Schlichtmann that I did not get out of bed for two days.” Tuddenham identified completely with the “small motions, loss of evidence being allowed, slippages and erosions in the legal system which prevented justice in the case.”

According to Peter Edelman, professor of law at Georgetown Law School, the concept of making social policy through the courts has changed. “The original romantic idea was that you could go into court and put the Constitution down on the desk in front of the judge,” says Edelman. In fact, he continues, this was never true. Edelman uses the nearly 20-year court history of Brown v. Board of Education to demonstrate the need for public-interest lawyers to be as diligent concerning public policy and media strategy as the most gifted litigators. Would Brown have gotten through the courts of today? The courts have already made constitutional adjustments—segregation has ended, legislatures have been re-apportioned—and the number of wins you can have using the Constitution has narrowed. According to a recent survey, 34 percent of Americans believe that federal judges are biased against the poor. “And that statistic is much greater in state court,” Edelman says.

Since the Reagan administration, the Republicans have attacked federal funding for legal-aid services, an initiative led by agribusiness because of the numerous farm-worker cases around the country. Before Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1995, the American Bar Association had always been able to protect legal-services funding. “After Gingrich took over, that was the first time they had enough of a majority to do this slash-and-burn kind of change,” Edelman says, citing the passing in 1996 of an onerous law which prevented legal services from filing class-action lawsuits of any kind, and from taking cases dealing with abortion or welfare. Now these cases all have to be privately funded, mostly through foundation grants.

“It is difficult to get cases through the courts, but every year from the law schools I get hundreds of remarkably gifted graduates to do this kind of work,” says Susan Plum, who oversees the Skadden Arps law firm’s public-interest fellowships. Still, Edelman sees a major shift in values since the 1960s, when Ralph Nader, Thurgood Marshall, and his own wife, Marian Wright Edelman, inspired a generation. “Now the money is not there for this kind of work, the courts are not as receptive, but it is not a change from the clear light of sunshine to the dark of storm. It is more gradual, but it is definitely there.… What I teach is that you have to be three-dimensional. There is no gold standard and never was.”

When Sarah Cleveland arrived in Belle Glade in 1994, she viewed her time there as a sort of Peace Corps experience. She had spent the previous two years in elite clerkships, working under Washington federal judge Louis Oberdorfer and then for Supreme Court justice Harry Blackmun. Her view of Blackmun was as reverential as her father’s had once been of Hugo Black. Just after she passed the bar, she was at the Supreme Court to observe the arguments on her case protesting the deportation of the Haitian boat people. “Have you ever been to Haiti? Haven’t you ever read Graham Greene’s The Comedians ?” Blackmun demanded of a government lawyer. At that moment Cleveland, who had won a Skadden fellowship to work in Belle Glade, decided to delay going there in order to clerk for Blackmun.

Once she got to Florida, she was marooned in a storefront with no lawbooks; for all her research she had to drive to Fort Lauderdale to the law library at Nova Southeastern University. Belle Glade was filled with empty apartments, but as soon as she mentioned that she was a lawyer working for Florida Rural Legal Services, the vacancy signs disappeared. Finally she found a garage apartment owned by a Palestinian merchant.

“Here are your cases,” Schell told her, and handed her the fallout litigation from the dog war, which had happened when Cleveland was still at Brown. Called Malcolm v. Okeelanta , it consisted of claims made against Okeelanta by 355 workers seeking damages for lost jobs and possessions. It had been filed late by a legal-aid office that was overwhelmed by the number of plaintiffs, so the major wage claim had exceeded the statute of limitations. “The young lawyers were trying to think of every legal theory they could,” Schell recalls. “Finally, I just filed the damned thing so we wouldn’t lose it all.”

Cleveland was soon supervising three cases, including the claims of the 355 men deported during the dog war, and she began to comprehend the massive litigation history of the Fanjuls. The office kept a file of news stories of suits filed against them, brought by everyone from partners in their growers’ cooperative to Everglades conservation groups. “Everyone who does business with the Fanjuls winds up suing them,” Schell says. “It’s nonsense,” says Joseph Klock, who was galled by the public reaction to the dog war, claiming it “was only an incident after the fact, as it was replayed in the press.” Schell had informed the Fanjuls he wanted the wrongly deported workers to get their jobs back. “They never called me back,” he says, and they were adamant that they would not settle the claims. “There is no question we mishandled the dog war,” Alfy Fanjul tells me, “and I am sorry that it was handled that way.” “Did it ever occur to you to investigate what in fact happened at Okeelanta?” I ask him. “I spoke with the farm manager and the lawyers,” he says. In the end, for all the reporters and lawyers who made their way to Belle Glade, the dog war became emblematic of migrant workers’ troubles in the Fanjuls’ sugar fields.

One day Schell turned to Cleveland and said, “We are deposing the labor-division head of the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association in our Bygrave litigation. Edward Tuddenham is coming to do it. You ought to drive over to Orlando to hear him.” As she and Tuddenham walked out of court together, Cleveland remembers, “I looked at him and I thought, You are so much like me.” He was 44 years old and engaged to another woman, but that day he asked Cleveland to fly to Washington and do research at the Supreme Court Library while he and Gorman were taking depositions.

Tuddenham was then living in Austin, where he worked in a small law firm. He sent Sarah his favorite novel, Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, and she sent him Zora Neale Hurston’s memoir of her childhood in Belle Glade. Love letters followed, but the romance progressed slowly. Two years later, Sarah’s father took her aside and told her that men who wait until they are 46 to get married rarely do. Susan Plum told Cleveland in the course of a phone call that she had recently taken another Skadden fellow “diamond shopping.” When Cleveland told Tuddenham about the call, he said, “We could do that, too.” Six months later, on a trip to Jamaica to take depositions, they were married on a sugar plantation near Montego Bay.

In April 1999, Tuddenham and Gorman were standing in the hallway of the court in Palm Beach when they suddenly looked down and saw a long black limo. “Here comes Willie,” said Tuddenham. “You could see the front of the car about five minutes before you could see the back end,” he adds today. The appearance of Willie Gary startled Tuddenham. The son of migrant farmers, Gary regularly reminds reporters that he picked corn in grade school. Today he lives in a 50-room mansion in Stuart, an hour north of Palm Beach, and flies around the country in his own Gulfstream II, the Wings of Justice, pursuing a lucrative personal-injury practice. Gary, who has two Bentleys, wears $3,000 suits and custom-made crocodile shoes. One day in court he explains his theory of lawyering to me: “It is 15 percent what a jury hears and 85 percent what a jury sees.” He arrives in court with stacks of elaborate printed posters on Masonite boards.

Gary is a courtroom spellbinder, a shrewdy who understands the first basic truth of modern jury trials—the importance of spin. He wrote letters to Gorman saying that he had spoken to “Jamaicans involved in these matters,” who told him they felt “nothing but the highest regard” for the Fanjuls. Incensed that Gary might have violated a judge’s orders by speaking with members of the class action, Gorman asked Gary for a list of the workers he had spoken to. In response, Gary called Gorman’s office and told his secretary that he had spoken to only two Okeelanta employees, neither of whom was a class member. This was the beginning of Gorman’s education in the dramatic style of Willie Gary.

Du Fresne had understood only too well what it would take to sucker-punch the Ivy League lawyers in a Palm Beach County court. “There was no way I was going to face down a jury trying to argue against thousands of poor black Jamaicans without a black lawyer,” she informs me. Gary took one look at the complicated tables of numbers on the tonnage issue and anticipated an easy win. “This is all that they have?” he asked du Fresne.

As we were sitting in the courtroom one day, Joseph Klock jotted in my notebook: “This ridiculous case is a perfect four-part syllogism: A equals B, B equals C, A equals C. God is love, love is blind, Ray Charles is blind, Ray Charles is God. That is Edward and David’s case. You are expected to cut eight tons of cane a day, therefore you are entitled to be paid by the ton. Therefore, you will be paid the hourly rate by the ton. It makes no sense.”

There was, however, plenty of evidence that did make sense. It seemed that the workers were being paid by the ton because the company budgeted each field by the ton. Gorman and Tuddenham provided a cluster of witnesses who testified how the fields were priced and how they were divided by rows and tonnage. Each year Atlantic and Okeelanta hit their budget estimates, no matter what. One witness after another testified that their hours had been cut by ticket writers in order to make their hourly wages appear higher. Du Fresne and Gary overwhelmed the plaintiffs with Cuban ticket writers and black farm managers who denied shaving hours. “We are the preacher and the teacher,” du Fresne said playfully. Gary, sensing the jury’s frustration with the legal minutiae and semantics, held up at one point in his final argument an elaborately printed trial board that read, this is a frivolous lawsuit. Then he held up another, of Lady Justice in Day-Glo green, and announced, “I want to introduce you to a lady.” For all of Gary’s theatrics, it was du Fresne who came up with the clinching argument for the Fanjuls. The workers had a contract they had agreed to: They were paid by the row. Did anyone ever tell them that they were being paid by the ton? They called farm managers, former ticket writers, and company lawyers, who all said no, no one had ever told them they were being paid by the ton.

Du Fresne was convinced that her most compelling witness was the government representative from the West Indies who had worked out the laborers’ contract. “They had never negotiated a contract in tonnage,” du Fresne said. Despite the cane cutters’ accounts of the grueling conditions in the fields, the heart of the matter was that it was a contract action. “People promise to do things in a contract. The Fanjuls hadn’t promised anything they didn’t do.”

Judge Edward Fine’s instructions to the jury were a puzzle: Did the contract require the Atlantic Sugar Association to pay a minimum of $5.30 for each ton? There was no reference in the judge’s instructions as to what might have been Atlantic’s actual budgeting plan. The jury was to focus on the intentions of the company, not on the tonnage-based theory of the plaintiff. Gorman and Tuddenham were convinced that the jury instructions were stacked against them. “Did they intend to pay them $5.30 a ton?” asked Gorman. “No, they had budgeted $4 a ton. We knew that. On the other side, you have the cutters; did they intend to get, or expect to get, $5.30 a ton? No. They did not know that the document that required it existed. If you had said to these guys, ‘Come to the United States and we will pay you $3 an hour,’ they would have said, ‘Fine!’ For $2 an hour they would be there!”

Roger Gamblin, the jury foreman, later said that he had been “irritated” by the judge’s instructions, wondering more than once, Why have we been here for a month? He believed, he said, that the judge had decided the case. Gamblin, who owns a title company, had no problem understanding the charts and graphs of the cutters’ case. He would later actually consult Gorman on a contract matter, he was so impressed with him in court. Inside the jury room, Gamblin said to the other jurors, “Did the company cheat the workers?” They said yes. The instructions from the judge, however, were clear. They had to decide whether the company had intended to pay the workers what it did. That was all. “It was clear that the incentive system was a moving benchmark,” he tells me. “I don’t use the word ‘fraud,’ but there was no level playing field for the workers.”

When the jurors returned to the courtroom, one woman was crying. The foreman asked the judge to read an unusual statement, which would later be reported in the Palm Beach Post.

Atlantic Sugar consistently misrepresented to the cutters the incentive features of their task system of payment. It was shameful.

However, the scope of the verdict form presented to us by the court was limited to a single issue—“Does the contract require Atlantic to pay plaintiffs a minimum task rate of $5.30 per ton of harvest cane?”

This case was not frivolous.

A few miles from the courthouse, in the neighborhood known as Little Guatemala, a former cane cutter named Michael Cameron lives in a single room attached to a family’s larger room in a dilapidated boardinghouse. He has no telephone, and it takes him some time to come to the door. He peers out, unsure whether to speak to me. It is a steamy April night, and he is in his underwear, but he quickly pulls on a pair of shorts. Ascertaining that I am not a lawyer or a cop, he agrees to come out and talk in the car.

Cameron, who was known as Big Mike at Okeelanta, was one of the fastest workers, sometimes cutting 20 tons in a single day. Arriving in Florida at age 21, he considered himself lucky just to get hired. That was, he said, “better than yard,” the Jamaican expression meaning no work. “Gentlemen, if it were easy, you would not be here,” the supervisor told the workers on their first day at Okeelanta.

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!”

“I am shocked,” says Joseph Klock in response. “The longevity of employment relationships at Alfy and Pepe’s companies contradicts that.”

After the Atlantic defeat, Tuddenham’s Austin partners met him with icy annoyance. “I told them, ‘This is the Titanic. I can’t abandon ship now. But the reality is we are partners. Do you want to get on the lifeboat?’” He recalls one partner, whom he had brought to the firm, saying, “Isn’t it time to give up? You’ve done enough! I have kids and I have a husband who hates this case. It is 10 years!” Tuddenham simply handed them an estimate of projected expenses—$100,000 to mount the appeal. Then he moved his office to the dining-room table at his house in South Austin, where he had started growing a row of sugarcane in the backyard.

His wife, Sarah, now a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, worked on briefs while she obtained tenure, aware that an increase in her salary would help to fund Bygrave. It was May 1999, and they had only four months until the next scheduled trial against another Fanjul company, Okeelanta.

A few weeks later, Tuddenham and Cleveland are in Jamaica on a fervid search for new witnesses to carry the October trial. They have a promising lead, a former ticket writer named Glenord Gordon, who worked at Okeelanta. A cane cutter named Adolphus Gordon, who is not related to Glenord, has already agreed to testify, but Glenord Gordon, as a ticket writer, would have far greater impact. Schell has told them that Gordon speaks without the thick Jamaican accent that American juries have trouble understanding, but there is no guarantee that they will find him. The district of Barbary Hall, where Gordon lives, has no telephone service, and mail is delivered only once a week. There are no road signs, no roads, and dirt trails cut through the bromeliad forests.

It is the monsoon season. Mosquitoes are swarming, the beaches are deserted. The map of Jamaica on Cleveland’s knees is crumpled from the humidity. At one hamlet, a Jamaican comes out of a shed with a tin roof and cinder-block walls to show us a silver machete he earned at the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative when he cut more cane than anyone else in his crew. “Is this case still not won?” he asks Tuddenham. “Not yet,” Tuddenham says. “Are the jobs coming back?” “I am afraid not,” he says, “but we are fighting to get you some of what you are owed.” The cane cutter is silent. He has no work and is clearly desperately poor.

The next day, Tuddenham and Cleveland find the man they’ve traveled so far to see. “Are you Glenord Gordon?” Tuddenham asks. Gordon, who is middle-aged, is at home, waiting out a torrential rainstorm, with his children around him. To describe his dealings with the farm manager, he uses the phrase “back on the knife,” the same language Michael Cameron used. “Back on the knife” means returning to cutting up to 10 tons of sugarcane a day and risking the loss of an eye or a toe because you have to work fast or be deported. “The men were complaining that I was robbing them of hours, and that all of the ticket writers were robbing them of hours,” he says. “I told them that’s what we had to do, and that we did not have any choice.… The company definitely knew that the hours were being cut. They had to know, because every day the men would be out there working 8, 9, 10 hours per day.… The men often worked more than eight hours, but they were never paid for more than eight hours.” Glenord Gordon says he is willing to testify, and Tuddenham brings him to Palm Beach to take the stand in Bygrave v. Okeelanta.

Pointing his finger at Adolphus Gordon on the last day of the trial in October 1999, Willie Gary tells the jury, “He lied to you. I don’t mean to offend anybody by using the word ‘lie,’ but I don’t know any other way to put it.” The trial has begun on a bizarre note, with Gorman and Tuddenham moving for a verdict against themselves. “The judge’s instructions were not changing. Why spend weeks going through a case that would lead to a train wreck?” says Tuddenham. Judge Edward Fine is not amused, and rules against them. Time after time, despite Tuddenham’s and Gorman’s objections, the judge allows Gary to accuse Adolphus Gordon of perjury—of telling “whoppers.” At the lunch break, I follow Glenord Gordon out of the courtroom, and he tells me, “I wanted to go home. I know what this town is like. There is no way they are going to rule for a black man from Jamaica.”

Despite Gordon’s testimony, once again a jury is unmoved by the meticulous presentation by Tuddenham and Gorman of charts and graphs. Michael Cameron even takes the stand and testifies that sometimes he didn’t bother to ask what he was being paid on the row. “I didn’t want the heartbreak,” he says. After weeks of expert testimony on both sides, the jury comes back in four hours, finding for the Fanjuls. The National Law Journal will later cite Bygrave v. Atlantic as one of the most significant defense wins of the year.

“Have you ever cut sugarcane?” I ask Alfy Fanjul the last time we are together. He has invited me to lunch on the Crili and is in high spirits after his second court win in the long-running Bygrave litigation. “I have cut cane, and it was so brutal I couldn’t last 20 minutes,” he says, laughing. “I had just come to Florida, and the farm manager wanted me to understand what this was. I thought I was going to have a heart attack.” We are seated at lunch, and Fanjul’s steward is serving us pasta.

From where we sit, I can see the other yachts in the marina and the causeway leading to West Palm Beach. It is easy to understand how Alfy and Pepe Fanjul inspired Carl Hiaasen’s creation of the Cuban sugar-baron brothers, the Rojos, in Strip Tease. This characterization so vexed the Fanjuls that Jorge Dominicis once drove five hours to Hiaasen’s retreat in the Keys to demand of him whether in fact Pepe and Alfy were the models for the Rojos. “Why, Jorge,” Hiaasen said, “the Rojos are an invention of my sick and perverted mind.”

I ask Fanjul if he believes he has any residual moral obligation to the thousands of cutters who once worked in his fields. Would he ever consider a bold public-relations move such as setting up an educational fund for the children of the cutters? Fanjul looks at me oddly. “Why would I do that?” he asks. “We give a lot of money to charity.” I mention that it might be good for his image, and talk a bit about James Burke of Johnson & Johnson, who once stripped store shelves of all Tylenol because of tampering. “You have won the cases so far, but all these hundreds of depositions and your first jury indicate that something went wrong in those fields. Wouldn’t it be small change to you to give a few million dollars as a goodwill gesture?” Fanjul smiles but says nothing. “Do you reject that idea?” I ask. “I reject the idea,” he says.

For hours after I leave the Crili, I think about Alfy Fanjul’s response, which was totally authentic and consistent with his position from the moment he set up in the Everglades. Fanjul truly believes he gave 20,000 Jamaicans an opportunity to make money in America, and he does not for a moment accept that he has done anything wrong. From Fanjul’s point of view, Michael Cameron and hundreds of other former cane cutters now have green cards and live in America, while 20,000 other cutters live in squalor without jobs on the islands.

Edward Tuddenham, ever standing on principle, is just as convinced that his efforts are well placed. “Is it possible that you will spend the rest of your life working on this case?” I ask him one night in Jamaica. We are sitting outside under a full moon, and he waits a long time to answer. “Yes,” he says.

On a rainy morning this past December, Tuddenham awakened early in Austin to listen to Joseph Klock and Laurence Tribe argue in front of the U.S. Supreme Court over the Florida recount. The night before, he had been up late rereading Moby Dick, and after thinking for so many years that Captain Ahab was evil, he was surprised that he now identified with Ahab’s obsession. “Someone has to try for the whale,” he said to his wife, Sarah Cleveland. Six months pregnant, she had just been named professor of the year at the University of Texas law school, where she teaches civil procedure. One of the cases she uses is Edward’s 1980 battle with the onion growers of Hereford, Texas. Cleveland is appalled by the fact that in class discussions many of her students side with the growers. Listening to Klock tangle with Justice Scalia, Tuddenham was struck with another irony; he felt a surprising affection for his longtime adversary and experienced a certain wistfulness thinking about the passage of time. Laurence Tribe, who was arguing for Gore, had been Tuddenham’s professor at Harvard Law. “It is as if every piece of my life is suddenly aligned. I thought, Here is the family arguing again,” he told me. Still ahead of Tuddenham are two more Bygrave cases to try, and he is waiting for the Florida appeals court to rule on his Okeelanta defeat; the Atlantic decision went against him. Listening to the arguments in the Supreme Court, he looked around his living room, at an antique map of Jamaica and his collection of 19th-century photographs of sugarcane cutters, and he was overwhelmed. “The sugar companies are unbelievably powerful. Joe Klock has unbelievable power,” he said. “Reconciling one’s faith in the system is a difficult and ongoing task.… Call me Ahab.”

Marie Brenner

Marie brenner is a writer-at-large at *vanity fair.*.

By Dan Adler

By Bess Levin

By Eric Lutz

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clock This article was published more than  10 years ago

Sugar tycoon Alfonso Fanjul now open to investing in Cuba under ‘right circumstances’

Alfonso Fanjul fled Cuba as a young man, leaving behind his family’s mansions and vast sugar-cane fields as they were being wrested away by the communist Castro regime.

In exile in the United States, he built an even larger sugar empire, amassing one of North America’s great fortunes and befriending members of Congress and presidents who benefited from his largess. The sting of his family’s forced departure from Cuba led him to become one of the principal funders of the U.S. anti-Castro movement.

Now, contrary to what almost anyone could have imagined, the 76-year-old Fanjul has begun to reassess old grievances and tentatively eye Cuba as a place for him and other U.S. businessmen to expand their enterprises. Quietly, without fanfare, Fanjul has started visiting the island of his birth and having conversations with top Cuban officials.

“If there is some way the family flag could be taken back to Cuba, then I am happy to do that,” Fanjul said in a rare interview, publicly discussing his recent visits to the island for the first time.

Fanjul’s about-face is a startling development for the exile network that has held a grip on the politics of U.S.-Cuba relations for decades and has played an outsize role in presidential campaigns. His trips place him at the vanguard of a group of ultra-wealthy U.S. investors with roots on the island whose economic interests and political clout are pushing the two countries toward a thaw in their half-century standoff.

Fanjul, in the interview, said repeatedly that his primary motivation in visiting Cuba has been a desire to "reunite the Cuban family," referring broadly to the Cuban diaspora and those who remain on the island. Business considerations could be explored only if there are political and diplomatic advances, he said.

“The [Fanjul] family was in Cuba for 150 years, and, yes, at the end of the day, I’d like to see our family back in Cuba, where we started. . . . But it has to be under the right circumstances,” said Fanjul, who is best known by his nickname, “Alfy.” “One day we hope that the United States and Cuba would find a way so the whole Cuban community could be able to live and work together.”

Fanjul, who lives in Palm Beach, Fla., and whose family holdings include Domino Sugar and refineries across the United States, Latin America and Europe, has managed to maintain a remarkably low profile for a politically connected tycoon. His access to the highest levels of power was evident during the Monica Lewinsky scandal of the 1990s, when the special prosecutor’s report noted that President Bill Clinton received a call from Fanjul during a private Oval Office moment with the intern.

Last week, the Fanjul family's influence over policymakers was on display when the U.S. House passed a farm bill that would cut subsidies to many agricultural products while leaving unscathed the controversial, taxpayer-backed program that protects sugar profits.

Fanjul visited Cuba in April 2012 and again in February 2013 as part of a delegation licensed through the Brookings Institution, the Washington think tank that has produced recent papers criticizing U.S. policy and calling on the Obama administration to further loosen sanctions. In Havana, he lingered with tears in his eyes at his family’s colonial-era manse, now a museum, with its elegant columns, lush inner courtyard, sparkling chandeliers and grand staircase.

He was so taken by the nostalgia and excitement of returning to the familiar streets of his youth, a travel companion recalled, that Fanjul enthusiastically chatted up random people of all ages as he walked around. He also met with Cuba’s foreign minister and toured state-run farms and a sugar mill with Cuban agricultural officials.

Unlike most other Cuban Americans who travel to the island, Fanjul has direct access to some of America’s most important policymakers. After returning from his first trip, Fanjul met with his good friend, then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, to express his changing views on Cuba. In November, Fanjul once again discussed his evolving mind-set with Clinton and her husband at a Clinton Foundation fundraiser in the Miami home of Cuban American businessman Paul Cejas, a former U.S. ambassador to Belgium.

Many embargo supporters say U.S. policy should change only when certain conditions are met, such as regime change or political reforms. Fanjul, however, said he prefers not to answer the question of whether he would require the fall of the Castro government or an end to communism before doing business in Cuba — saying that he respects existing U.S. law.

“Right now there’s no way for us to consider investing in Cuba. How can you work a deal if you’re not legally allowed to do it?” he said.

“Now, would we consider an investment at some later date?” continued Fanjul, a permanent U.S. resident who maintains Spanish citizenship. “If there’s an arrangement within Cuba and the United States, and legally it can be done and there’s a proper framework set up and in place, then we will look at that possibility. We have an open mind.”

He said the Cuban government — which has business deals with companies from countries such as Canada and Spain — would have to change its economic structure to make it easier and safer for outside companies to make money.

“Cuba has to presumably satisfy the requirements that investors need, which are primarily a return on investment and security of the investment, so they feel comfortable with what they’re doing,” he said. “I personally would look at that in the same framework as any investor would.”

Evolving politics

The logistical, political and legal complexities involved in any potential expansion of U.S.-based businesses onto Cuban soil are staggering. Fanjul’s willingness to hold meetings with the Castro government puts him on a potential collision course with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), a Cuban American whose campaigns have been supported by Fanjul but who is an unwavering advocate for the embargo and has the power to thwart any attempts to lift it.

Trickier still would be the impact on presidential politics, with Florida’s Cuban American electorate still a significant factor in the battle for that state’s crucial electoral college votes.

Already, there have been signs that younger Cuban Americans, particularly those born in the United States, are moving away from the hard-line views of their parents and grandparents. Now, as Fanjul’s recent gestures show, even some of the most entrenched exiles are evolving, and politicians accustomed to embracing the Cuba trade embargo in their pursuit of Florida’s large Cuban American electorate will have to calibrate the risks and rewards of evolving along with them.

Hillary Clinton, the putative Democratic front-runner for president if she chooses to run in 2016, spoke out in favor of the Obama administration’s actions relaxing restrictions on family travel and cash flow to the island. Yet she, like many politicians in both parties, has repeatedly expressed support for continued sanctions. She is close with several key players, besides Fanjul, who have stated an openness to more engagement with Cuba.

Fanjul, a longtime supporter of Bill Clinton's campaigns and causes, would probably be a major donor, as well as a close adviser on Cuba-related matters, to Hillary Clinton should she run. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), a longtime Clinton confidant, traveled to Cuba for a trade mission in recent years and held discussions with high-ranking government officials there. And Cejas, whom Bill Clinton appointed ambassador to Belgium, has expressed doubts about the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba.

“I can tell you one thing that became very clear to me: The embargo is really an embargo against America ourselves. Because Americans cannot do business with Cuba, where there are incredible opportunities for growth,” said Cejas, who traveled to Cuba with Fanjul.

The issue could prove thornier for Republicans, such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a Cuban American widely seen as a possible 2016 presidential candidate. A staunch supporter of sanctions who blasted President Obama's loosening of some restrictions as an "enrichment of a Cuban regime that routinely violates the basic human rights and dignity of its people," Rubio has cited the Fanjul family as a crucial source of campaign funds and political connections.

The family recently hosted another possible GOP presidential candidate, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who headlined a Republican Governors Association reception last month at the Palm Beach home of Fanjul’s nephew, Jose “Pepe” Fanjul Jr., just as a scandal was erupting around Christie.

The Fanjuls’ internal family politics — Alfy backs Democrats and brother Pepe Sr. supports Republicans — reflect both the complexities of the Cuban American experience and perhaps the shrewdness of a family dynasty that knows how to hedge its bets.

Asked about his brother’s trips to Cuba, Pepe, in an e-mailed statement from his office, said he has “always held firm that when the time comes and Cubans are reunited, I will return and help our fellow Cubans rebuild my birthplace.” But, he added: “As you know, I have yet to return.”

An untapped market

In recent years, other prominent Cuban Americans have begun to talk more about opening relations with the island. A number of these exiles see Cuba, communist or not, as a potentially lucrative market that has been closed off to American corporations by decades-old trade barriers they helped erect. Now, some say, the long-standing embargo has failed. They say increased foreign investment in Cuba and greater engagement with people there could spur greater reforms.

But such suggestions have frequently been met with anger by the older generation of Cuban exiles.

Miami businessman Carlos Saladrigas, for instance, said he has been openly branded a traitor in some circles because of his visits to Cuba and his interest in possibly changing U.S. policy.

“I used to be as hard-line as they come,” said Saladrigas, a member of corporate boards for firms such as Duke Energy and Advance Auto Parts. But now he warns that U.S. businesses, without the ability to invest in Cuba, could find themselves sidelined if the island begins to open up. “Do we as Cuban Americans, or do we as Americans, want to be left out of the picture?” he asked. “You can influence Cuba’s future much more by participating in Cuba’s future than by staying away.”

But the shift by Fanjul is far more significant. Not only do he and his family control one of the largest sugar operations in the world, but they also have been major donors to activist groups, such as the Cuban American National Foundation and the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC, that have been vocal advocates for trade sanctions.

Rumors of Fanjul’s Cuba visit prompted Mauricio Claver-Carone, a Washington-based board member of the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC, to confront the sugar magnate during a recent private lunch in West Palm Beach.

Claver-Carone said that he told Fanjul his trips had served only to help the Cuban regime. “I told him they were using him as a tool,” Claver-Carone said, “and that with his stature comes responsibility.”

Fanjul’s trips followed policy shifts by the Cuban American National Foundation, which has lost a number of its more conservative members amid its support for loosening restrictions on travel and money as a way to help Cubans living on the island. “Having known Alfy for 40 years, I think we can trust him to do the right thing,” said Pepe Hernandez, president of the foundation.

Fanjul said repeatedly during multiple interviews that “this is a highly sensitive issue.” He said he needed to “stay at a high altitude” in discussing potential changes in U.S. policies toward Cuba because of the political challenges involved. “What I say can be taken in the wrong context,” he said.

An opening for foreigners

Fanjul’s Brookings-organized trips coincided with calls by President Raúl Castro to rapidly revive Cuba’s moribund sugar industry. Castro has begun permitting foreign companies to participate in sugar production for the first time since the 1959 revolution, and Brazilian firms would be likely candidates to seize new opportunities in Cuba.

Fanjul said his visits were unrelated to Castro’s sugar initiative. He said he has not met with Castro and held no specific discussions with Cuban officials about investments in Cuban sugar. Yet experts say there are many reasons that the Cubans would hope to entice the Fanjul family.

“The Cuban government can revive its sugar industry only with an infusion of foreign investment,” said American University professor Philip Brenner, an expert on the Cuban economy and politics. “The old Cuban mills are enormously inefficient, and the country needs modernization and mechanization to increase productivity.”

Investments by Brazilian sugar companies in Cuba put those companies in the back yard of the Fanjuls’ operations, which dominate the Dominican Republic and Florida and have recently expanded into Mexico. Brenner, who regularly meets with Cuban officials, thinks the Cuban government may now “be willing to consider the possibility of permitting aging sugar barons” from the United States to invest and participate.

Fanjul joined the Brookings board this past July and has donated at least $200,000 to the think tank, which has hosted Cuban officials for panel discussions geared toward encouraging greater communication and loosened restrictions on doing business with Cuba. Ted Piccone, Brookings’ acting vice president and foreign policy program director, wrote an open memo to Obama last month urging him to use his executive authority to give direct aid to entrepreneurs on the island and expand travel licenses.

The memo did not mention Fanjul, but it said, “These measures would draw support from key political and business constituencies in the United States (including Florida).”

The Fanjul trips to Cuba reflect a broader, though still subtle, easing of Cold War-era tensions between the United States and the Castro regime. In recent months, U.S. and Cuban officials have engaged in small-scale diplomatic talks on issues such as immigration, drugs and offshore oil drilling. And Obama drew attention to the relationship in December when he shook hands with Castro at the memorial service for Nelson Mandela in South Africa.

Obama hinted at a November fundraiser in Miami of more changes ahead when he said U.S. policy toward Cuba should be “creative” and “thoughtful.”

“Keep in mind that when Castro came to power, I was just born,” he said. “So the notion that the same policies that we put in place in 1961 would somehow still be as effective as they are today in the age of the Internet and Google and world travel doesn’t make sense.”

Fanjul’s own travel to the island gave him insights not only about business possibilities, he said, but other possibilities, too.

“Do I have a soft spot in my heart? Yes, that’s my country. My interest is finding a way to unite the Cuban family,” he said. “When you talk with people and hear them, it humanizes. Talking is the first step.”

Alice Crites contributed to this report.

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America's Sugar Daddies

Sugar growers in this country, long protected from global competition, have had a great run at the expense of just about everyone else -- refineries, candy manufacturers, other food companies, individual consumers and farmers in the developing world. But now the nation's sugar program, which guarantees a domestic price for raw sugar that can be as much as three times the world price, needs to be terminated. It has become far too costly to America's global economic and strategic interests.

The less defensible a federal policy is on its merits, the greater the likelihood that it generates (or originates from) a great deal of cash in Washington, in the form of campaign contributions. Sugar is a sweet case in point. The Fanjul brothers, Florida's Cuban-American reigning sugar barons who preside over Palm Beach's yacht-owning society, were alone responsible for generating nearly $1 million in soft-money donations during the 2000 election cycle. Alfonso Fanjul, the chief executive of the family-controlled Flo-Sun company, served as Bill Clinton's Florida co-chairman in 1992 -- and even merited a mention in the impeachment-scandal Starr report, when Monica Lewinsky testified that the president received a call from him during one of their trysts. Meanwhile, brother Pepe is equally energetic in backing Republicans, so all bases are covered.

The Fanjuls harvest 180,000 acres in South Florida that send polluted water into the Everglades. (A crucial part of their business over the years has been to lobby not just against liberalization of the sugar trade, but against plans to have the sugar industry pay its fair share of the ambitious $8 billion Everglades restoration project.) The Fanjuls had been Cuba's leading sugar family for decades before Fidel Castro's takeover. Crossing the Straits of Florida, they bought land in the vicinity of Lake Okeechobee, which feeds the Everglades, and imported platoons of poorly paid Caribbean migrant workers. Their business was aided by the embargo on Cuban sugar. The crop is protected from other competition by an intricate system of import quotas that dates back to 1981.

The government does not pay sugar producers income supports as it does many other kinds of farmers. Instead, it guarantees growers like the Fanjuls an inflated price by restricting supply. Only about 15 percent of American sugar is imported under the quota rules, and while the world price is about 7 cents a pound, American businesses that need sugar to make their products must pay close to 21 cents. Preserving this spread between domestic and world sugar prices costs consumers an estimated $2 billion a year, and nets the Fanjuls -- who have been called the first family of corporate welfare -- tens of millions annually. The sugar exporters who are able to sell to the United States also benefit from those astronomical prices. The Dominican Republic is the largest quota holder, and one of the big plantation owners there is -- surprise -- the Fanjul family.

The sugar situation hurts American businesses and consumers, but its worst impact is on the poor countries that try to compete in the global agricultural markets. Their farmers might never be able to compete with corn or wheat farmers in the United States, even if the playing field were leveled. But they can grow cotton and sugar at lower prices than we can, no matter how advanced our technology. Our poorer trading partners bitterly resent the way this country feels entitled to suspend market-driven rules whenever it appears they will place American producers at a disadvantage.

In fairness, the United States is not alone in distorting the sugar trade, and the European Union's massively subsidized exports of beet sugar make it the biggest culprit. The American sugar lobby uses that fact as a shield, arguing that the crop not be included in any regional trade deals until distortions are addressed by all countries at the World Trade Organization. But quotas are set between trading partners, not on a global level. Right now the United States is negotiating the creation of a hemispheric free trade area that would benefit many United States industries, including other agricultural sectors. It is ridiculous for the sugar lobby to argue -- as it does vociferously -- that sugar should not be included in the agreement even though it is one of the few products that some Latin American republics can hope to ship to the American market.

So far the Bush administration has rightly rejected the sugar lobby's push to keep the commodity off the table. The danger, however, is that American trade negotiators might still prove far too deferential to sugar industries when hammering out the trade deals' specifics. For instance, any move to phase in elimination of sugar quotas over a period longer than a decade (as was done in the North American Free Trade Agreement) would undermine any promise a trade deal might hold for poor farmers in Latin America. The strength of the protectionist sugar lobby in Washington -- which unites Southeastern cane growers and Midwestern beet farmers -- was apparent in the success of Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana last year in bashing Nafta's modest sugar provision during her re-election bid.

If the sugar trade were liberalized, world prices would start creeping up and domestic prices would fall, which would benefit both the developing world and the American economy. The industry itself cites ''alarming'' studies that if the United States imported an additional two million metric tons -- roughly the amount Central America exports -- domestic prices would be cut in half. But that is no argument for opposing trade liberalization. That is an argument for the handful of individuals who control the sugar business in this country to start thinking about a new line of work, and be grateful for the long run they had.

Harvesting Poverty: Editorials in this series remain online at nytimes.com/harvestingpoverty.

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The Fanjul brothers — Cuban born Alfonso "Alfy" Fanjul Jr., José "Pepe" Fanjul, Alexander Fanjul, and Andres Fanjul — are owners of Fanjul Corp., a vast sugar and real estate conglomerate in the United States and the Dominican Republic. It comprises the subsidiaries Domino Sugar, Florida Crystals, C&H Sugar, Redpath Sugar, former Tate & Lyle sugar companies, American Sugar Refining, La Romana International Airport, and resorts surrounding La Romana, Dominican Republic.

The Fanjul brothers were born in Cuba and are descendants of Spanish immigrants. [ 1 ] Alfonso Fanjul Sr. married the daughter of Spaniard Andres Gomez-Mena who immigrated to Cuba in the 19th century and built up an empire of sugar mills and property by the time he died in 1910. The couple's holdings were then combined to create a large business of cane sugar mills, refineries, distilleries, and significant amounts of real estate. Due to Fidel Castro's 1959 Marxist Cuban Revolution, the family moved to Florida along with other wealthy, dispossessed Cuban families. In 1960, Alfonso Sr., the father of the current CEO of Fanjul Corp. Alfonso Jr., bought 4,000 acres (16 km 2 ) of property near Lake Okeechobee along with some sugar mills from Louisiana and started over in the US. Alfonso Sr. and his son Alfy Fanjul got the firm off the ground and Pepe, Alexander and Andres joined in the late 1960s and 1970s. Pepe Fanjul Jr. joined the sugar firm in 2002. [ 2 ] As of 2008, the company owned 155,000 acres (63,000 ha) in Palm Beach County. [ 3 ]

In October 1984, Alfonso Fanjul and J. Pepe Fanjul along with Gulf and Western Industries announced they had reached a deal for Gulf and Western to sell its sugar businesses in Florida and the Dominican Republic, along with associated operations, to the Fanjul companies, for an undisclosed amount. In the Dominican Republic, the transaction included 240,000 acres of land, a sugar mill, two hotels in the capital of Santo Domingo and the exclusive resort Case De Campo in the eastern region of La Romana. Assets included in the Florida purchase were 90,000 acres of land in Palm Beach County, a sugar mill and a sugar refinery. [ 4 ]

In 2001, the family expanded into the charter school business. They established a religious elementary school, Glades Academy, which accepts taxpayer-funding for 200 students. They also established a high school Everglades Preparatory Academy, which serves 600 taxpayer-funded students.

The Fanjul family focus their philanthropic activities on the rural communities of western Palm Beach County, including the creation of one single family strengthening center offering limited day care, after-school care and food assistance programs. [ 5 ] In 2013, New Hope Charities celebrated 25 years of service to the communities and honored J. Pepe Fanjul, its longtime chairman. [ 6 ]

With the region's desire for expanded economic development in the agricultural area, the Fanjul brothers partnered with the Business Development Board to assist full-time with the recruitment of economic opportunities. [ 7 ]

2. Business Holdings

The Fanjuls began vertically integrating their sugar holdings in 1991 with the creation of the company's own sugar marketing arm. Previously, their Florida sugar was marketed by Savannah Foods & Industries of Georgia. [ 8 ]

In a turn of diversification, in 1994, Flo-Sun broke ground on a joint venture with U.S Generating Co. to construct a cogeneration power plant adjacent to the company's Okeelanta sugar mill in western Palm Beach County. At a cost of $200 million, the power plant would produce energy from sugar cane stalks and woody waste that would be delivered via Florida Power and Light to an estimated 46,000 homes. [ 9 ] After the partnership dissolved, Flo-Sun began operating the biomass power plant on its own in 1996 and expanded it to the largest in the nation by 2006 [ 10 ]

In 2010, the Fanjul family celebrated the 50th anniversary of their American sugar companies, which at the time included 187,000 acres of farming in Palm Beach County, Florida, with 2,000 jobs and more than 650,000 tons of sugar. [ 11 ] Worldwide the Fanjul companies at the time included four raw sugar mills and 10 refineries in six countries, making them the world's largest refiner of cane sugar, producing 6 million tons of sugar annually. [ 11 ]

In 2011, Fanjul Corp. was ranked the third largest private company in Florida. CEO Alfonso Fanjul granted a $1 million charitable contribution to the University of Miami to build a research center for the top eye hospital in the nation. [ 12 ]

The Fanjul brothers were large shareholders and directors of Southeast Bank before its takeover and liquidation by the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 1991. In addition, they are the majority shareholders and directors of FAIC Securities, which was investigated by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission for regulatory violations. [ 13 ]

3. Cuba Activities

Over the years, the Fanjul brothers had made clear they intend to reclaim their lost properties and mansions in Cuba, and in early in 2014, Alfonso Fanjul announced "business considerations could be explored only if there are political and diplomatic advances" in Cuba. [ 14 ] [ 15 ] [ 16 ] This brought a sharp response in Washington, D.C., from two of the U.S Congressmen from Florida:

Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) released the following statement on reports of Cuban-American businessman Alfonso Fanjul considering investing in Cuba and its sugar industry.

"I am outraged by reports that a fellow Cuban-American, who has witnessed the atrocities inflicted by the Castro regime, has apparently chosen short-term profit over standing with the Cuban people in their struggle for freedom.

"Some might be blind to the Castro regime's brutality and ruthless oppression, but Alfonso Fanjul's betrayal is compounded because he knows better. He knows very well that any investments made with the Castro regime will not help the Ladies in White, Unión Patriótica de Cuba, the Orlando Zapata Tamayo National Civic Resistance and Civil Disobedience Front, or other pro-democracy groups, but rather, will go straight to the pockets of the Cuban people’s jailers and continue to prop them up.

"Alfonso should cry less for his lost mansion, and more for the imprisoned artists and musicians, oppressed independent journalists, or for the women that are beaten every Sunday for simply wanting to celebrate mass." [ 17 ]

U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa, made the following statement on reports of Cuban-American sugar tycoon Alfonso Fanjul considering investing in Cuba:

"At a time when the democracy activists on the island are facing even harsher reprisals from the brutal Cuban regime, it's pathetic that a Cuban-American tycoon feels inspired to trample on the backs of those activists in order to give the communist thugs more money with which to repress. The only little old thing that is standing in Alfy's way of realizing these sleazy business deals with the devil is US law. He doesn't talk about the arbitrary arrests of pro-freedom leaders in Cuba or the continual beatings endured by the peaceful Damas de Blanco. Oh no, for Alfy, the only hindrance to turning a profit off the suffering of the Cuban people is pesky US laws and he is working with groups to undo those laws. It is sickening to read that he brings up the separation of the Cuban family when he is doing all he can to exacerbate that problem. Shame on him..." [ 18 ]

4. Political Influence in the United States

Alfy Fanjul has never become a U.S. citizen. He remains a permanent U.S. resident who maintains Spanish citizenship. [ 14 ] Alfonso Fanjul served as co-chairman of Bill Clinton's Florida campaign in 1992 and is a major contributor and fundraiser for the Democratic Party. His brother Pepe, who is a U.S. citizen, contributes to the Republicans. [ 19 ]

The Fanjul family was explicitly thanked by Marco Rubio for their support in his autobiographical memoir An American Son: A Memoir . [ 20 ]

5. Popular Culture

The Fanjul brothers were parodied in Carl Hiaasen's 1993 novel Strip Tease , which features a pair of Cuban brothers who own a large sugar conglomerate, that receives enormous profits from the exploitation of immigrant labor and the subsidies regularly voted to them by the United States Congress. [ 21 ]

The brothers also were a focus in the Jamie Johnson documentary The One Percent (2006), which showcases the corrupt use of cane workers and especially "imported" labor. The U.S. Dept. of Labor's "List of Goods Produced by Child or Forced Labor" [ 22 ] report lists sugarcane from the Dominican Republic as having child and forced labor. This is a small source of raw sugar that is imported from 40 different companies to be refined then sold by Domino Foods, a marketing cooperative that among its products sells the Florida Crystals brand.

The 2007 film, The Sugar Babies , is a documentary on the lives of Haitians and their children working in the Dominican Republic sugar cane fields and the Central La Romana factory run by the Fanjuls. [ 23 ]

José "Pepe" Fanjul was part of 17 December 2012 BBC2 television edition of fly-on-the-wall documentary Inside Claridge's . He was shown as a regular client of the Claridge's Hotel, enjoying a luxury lifestyle in a £3,500 a night room, with a shooting in Scotland and trips across the world. He was said to have spent 300 nights at the hotel over the past decade.

• "International Migration in Cuba". International Migration in Cuba. Penn State Press. 2011. https://books.google.com/books?id=zMfsVb9eh-QC&dq=alfonso+fanjul&source=gbs_navlinks_s. Retrieved 26 July 2017. 
• "23 Under 40". Archived from the original on 14 March 2012. https://web.archive.org/web/20120314094527/http://www.poder360.com/article_detail.php?id_article=542. Retrieved 4 May 2010. 
• Cave, Damien (31 July 2008). "A Dance of Environment and Economics in the Everglades". nytimes.com. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/31/us/31sugar.html. Retrieved 15 May 2016. 
• COLE, ROBERT J. (6 October 1984). "Sugar Sale By G.&W.". nytimes.com. https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/06/business/sugar-sale-by-g-w.html. Retrieved 15 May 2016. 
• "People of Palm Beach County - Alfonso Fanjul, Sr.". Historical Society of Palm Beach County. Fusedog Media. 2009. http://www.pbchistoryonline.org/page/alfonso-fanjul-sr. Retrieved 15 May 2016. 
• Donnelly, Shannon (17 December 2013). "New Hope Charities hosts annual holiday bazaar, toasts Fanjul". Palm Beach Daily News. http://www.palmbeachdailynews.com/news/lifestyles/new-hope-charities-hosts-annual-holiday-bazaar-toa/ncMHN/. Retrieved 15 May 2016. 
• "BDB teams with Glades leaders to recruit businesses". Palm Beach Post. 4 February 2013. http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/business/bdb-teams-with-glades-leaders-to-recruit-businesse/nWFnh/. Retrieved 15 May 2016. 
• McCABE, BOB (20 April 1991). "Flo-sun To Establish Sugar Marketing Arm". tribunedigital-sunsentinel. http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1991-04-20/business/9101200067_1_refined-sugar-sugar-mill-dominican-republic. Retrieved 15 May 2016. 
• McCABE, ROBERT (18 February 1994). "Sugar Cane Stalks To Fuel Power Plant". tribunedigital-sunsentinel. http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1994-02-18/business/9402171026_1_sugar-mill-fanjul-brothers-dominican-republic. Retrieved 15 May 2016. 
• Monroe, Martha C.; McConnell, Lindsey (February 2011), Wood to Energy: Co-Firing with Wood and Sugarcane Waste, University of Florida, http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pdffiles/FR/FR20300.pdf 
• Salisbury, Susan (28 October 2010). "Florida Crystals' 50th anniversary a landmark in family's journey". palmbeachpost.com. http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/business/florida-crystals-50th-anniversary-a-landmark-in--1/nLmKg/. Retrieved 15 May 2016. 
• "University of Miami gets $1M gift from Fanjul family - South Florida Business Journal". South Florida Business Journal. 11 August 2011. http://www.bizjournals.com/southflorida/news/2011/08/11/ums-bascom-palmer-gift-fanjul.html. Retrieved 15 May 2016. 
• HENRIQUES, DIANA B. (23 June 1995). "S.E.C. Seeks Information On Bond Issue". nytimes.com. https://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/23/business/sec-seeks-information-on-bond-issue.html. Retrieved 15 May 2016. 
• Wallsten, Peter; Roig-Franzia, Manuel; Hamburger, Tom (2 February 2014). "Sugar tycoon Alfonso Fanjul now open to investing in Cuba under ‘right circumstances’". Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sugar-tycoon-alfonso-fanjul-now-open-to-investing-in-cuba-under-right-circumstances/2014/02/02/4192b016-8708-11e3-a5bd-844629433ba3_story.html. Retrieved 15 May 2016. 
• O'Brien, Timothy L. (21 November 2004). "The Castro Collection". nytimes.com. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/business/yourmoney/the-castro-collection.html. Retrieved 15 May 2016. 
• Echevarria, Vito (1 December 2007). "Fla. sugar king Pepe Fanjul dreams of post-Castro Cuba. - Free Online Library". CubaNews. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Fla.+sugar+king+Pepe+Fanjul+dreams+of+post-Castro+Cuba-a0171812516. Retrieved 15 May 2016. 
• ": Diaz-Balart: Fanjul Should Focus on Freedom, Not Lost Mansion". Capitol Hill Cubans. 3 February 2014. http://www.capitolhillcubans.com/2014/02/diaz-balart-fanjul-should-focus-on.html. Retrieved 15 May 2016. 
• "Capitol Hill Cubans: Ros-Lehtinen: Fanjul's Actions Are Shameful". capitolhillcubans.com. 3 February 2014. http://www.capitolhillcubans.com/2014/02/ros-lehtinen-fanjuls-actions-are.html. Retrieved 15 May 2016. 
• Barlett, Donald L.; Steele, James B. (23 November 1998). "Sweet deal why are these men smiling ? The reason is in your sugar bowl". TIME. http://edition.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/time/1998/11/16/sweet.deal.html. Retrieved 15 May 2016. 
• "Reading Of Marco Rubio’s Biography". kenfields.net.. http://kenfields.net/reading-of-marco-rubios-biography/. 
• Grunwald, Michael (2007). The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-7432-5107-5. https://books.google.com/books?id=olHjhlx0Em8C. 
• "List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor". dol.gov. https://www.dol.gov/ilab/reports/child-labor/list-of-goods/. Retrieved 15 May 2016. 
• Miller, Kimberly. Fanjuls disturbed by film's portrayal of sugar 'slavery'. Palm Beach Post, (29 June 2007). Retrieved on 9 September 2008. https://web.archive.org/web/20070701234935/http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2007/06/29/c1a_SUGAR_CANE_0629.html

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Florida Crystals’ Fanjul brothers inducted into Ag Hall of Fame

Florida sugar industry pioneers Alfonso “Alfy” Fanjul, 80, and J. Pepe Fanjul, 73, were inducted into the Florida Agricultural Hall of Fame earlier this month in Tampa.

Alfonso Fanjul, chairman and chief executive officer of Florida Crystals Corp., headquartered in West Palm Beach, and his brother Pepe Fanjul, vice chairman, chief operating officer and president of the company, were nominated for the honor by John L. Hundley, their longtime business partner.

READ MORE ABOUT FLORIDA SUGAR’S GLOBAL PRESENCE

Florida Crystals and Hundley, founder/president of Hundley Farms in Belle Glade, have a joint sweet corn farming venture that dates back 27 years.

The Fanjul family’s roots in sugar reach back more than 150 years. The family left Cuba in 1959, founded their company in Florida in 1960 as Osceola Farms Co. and New Hope Sugar Company.

At that time, the family purchased 4,000 acres of land in western Palm Beach County and several sugar mills in Louisiana. The mills were dismantled, transported by barge to Florida and erected in Pahokee as the Osceola sugar mill. The first crop of 10,500 tons of sugar was produced in 1961-62.

Today Florida Crystals farms on 190,000 acres in Palm Beach County and grows conventional and organic sugarcane, sweet corn and rice. The company also owns and operates two sugar mills, a sugar refinery, a rice mill, a packaging and distribution center and the largest biomass renewable power plant in North America, all in Palm Beach County.

Florida Crystals’ subsidiary, ASR Group, which it owns in partnership with Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida, is the world’s largest cane sugar refining company, with refineries in Louisiana, California, New York, Maryland, Canada, Mexico, England, Italy and Portugal.

At the ceremony in Tampa attended by more than 500 people, the brothers said the honor is meaningful because it came from fellow farmers.

“It is recognition by our peers, the people who really know what heart and grit it takes to succeed in agriculture,” Alfy Fanjul said. “When people ask me what I do for a living, I say, ‘I’m a farmer.’ That’s what I am. I have done every job there is to do on a farm.”

Pepe Fanjul said, “Alfy and I believe that this honor is given to those who love the land and are champions of agriculture. We have dedicated our lives to protecting farmland and to keeping farmland in food production, and we will continue to do so for our descendants.”

The brothers grew up going to their family farms with their father and their grandfathers. Farming is their heritage and today, the sixth generation of the Fanjul family is working at Florida Crystals.

While Florida’s sugarcane was once hand-harvested, it is has been fully machine-harvested since the early 1990s.

Through the brothers’ leadership, Florida Crystals has invested in precision agriculture, which allows the company to use precise amounts of fertilizer and other inputs only when they are needed.

Florida Crystals has a state-of-the-art research center in Belle Glade with adjacent greenhouses and a new agricultural center where the precision data is analyzed.

Alfy Fanjul said, “The advancements in science and technology that we are employing on our farms make me more excited than I have ever been. We are growing more food to feed more people, and we’ve never been more sustainable. Florida agriculture has a wonderful story and a bright future, and we’re so proud to be part of it.”

Other producers who farm in the Everglades Agricultural Area who have been inducted into the hall of fame include Edward, Ferdinand and Joseph Duda in 2015, Fritz Stein in 2008, George Wedgworth in 1994 and Ruth Wedgworth in 1988.

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Crili Yacht

American yacht builders Christensen, have produced and delivered the Crili yacht in 2006. Crili is the 12th largest superyacht produced by the company and comes in at position 1147 of the largest yachts currently operating in the world. In this article, we dive into the details of the yacht and show you some of its key highlights.

Crili yacht owner

Chairman of the board of ASR Group, Alfonso Fanjul, is the owner of the Crili yacht. Originally from Cuba, the Fanjul family migrated to the United States in the early 1950s. Alfonso leads the refined sugar industry in the US, which is where he has built his net worth.

His current net worth is estimated to be around $8.2 billion dollars. Alfonso had acquired the Crili superyacht for $23 million dollars. An approximate amount of $2.3 million is spent annually for the maintenance of the yacht.

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Performance figures and specifications of yacht Crili

There are several notable aspects of the yacht that are worth mentioning. To give you an insight into the yacht, we take you on a detailed tour of its interior, exterior and technical features.

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Step into the elegant interior of the yacht

Classy and elegant that’s how we would describe the interior of the Crili yacht. Built in the year 2006, the styling cues on the interior might be of that era, yet still relevant today. The interior of the yacht Crili was crafted by Jacqueline Mann Design. It has three decks in total, with ample space in the main deck.

You will find a fully furnished dining and lounge area on the main deck with beautiful lighting. The walls of the yacht are covered in a glossy wood finish that provides a rustic and premium feel. There are a total of 8 luxury cabins onboard that can easily accommodate 16 guests.

You also have a crew of 10 members who provide you with all the assistance you need during your voyage.

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The regal exterior of yacht Crili

When it comes to the exterior of the yacht, the classiness of the design follows. It has a regal exterior with a long and tall stance. While the bow area is not as spacious as you would expect it to be, the stern makes up for the lack of space.

There’s also an open deck jacuzzi that provides you the opportunity to soak in peace while enjoying the extraordinary views of the vast ocean. Overall the exterior of the yacht is simple and admirable.

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Technical details of the yacht

The Crili yacht is powered by two refined Detroit engines. These engines are capable of hauling the yacht to the maximum speed of 17 knots while managing a cruising speed of 15 knots.

The fuel capacity on the Crili is 48,370 liters, and freshwater holding capacity is measured at 7,300 liters. The full length of the Crili yacht is measured at 47.85 meters, with the draft measuring 2.3 meters in length and the beam measuring 9 meters in length.

The total gross tonnage of the yacht is just shy of 500 units coming in at 499 GT. Both the hull and superstructure of the yacht are built using GRP materials.

Crili yacht Location

According to the AIS reports , the Crili yacht was located in the Atlantic Ocean, with exact coordinates being 26.02418 N / 79.12679 W. These coordinates were reported as of 18th November 2022.

The yacht had departed from Palm Beach and is currently sailing towards the Bahamas and is expected to dock at the port of Chub Cay. The travel speed of the yacht has also been recorded at 10 knots. The Crili yacht is currently cruising under the Cayman Islands flag.

Yacht Crili highlights

The table below provides you with a detailed look into all the specification figures, features, and other highlights of the Crili yacht:

Crili yacht: An incredible luxury yacht

Yacht Crili is in its 16th year of operation yet still works as well as a brand new yacht. Everything from the interior to the exterior, including its performance, is commendable. The builders of the yacht have done a fantastic job with the Crili.

As we specialize in luxury yacht rental services in Dubai , we have seen a gradual rise in demand for yachts like the Crili. While purchasing the Crili might not be an option for now, chartering similar yachts is possible.

Next, read about the Ionian yacht  known for its on-screen appearance like Crili yacht.

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Fanjul, Alfonso & Jose

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Alfonso Fanjul is the Chairman and CEO and his brother Jose “Pepe” Fanjul is the Vice Chairman, President, and COO of Florida Crystals Corporation and Flo-Sun Inc., one of the country’s largest sugar cane growers and refiners.

The Fanjul’s were both born in Cuba, Alfonso Fanjul in 1937 and Jose Fanjul in 1944. They both arrived in the United States with their parents after the Castro government confiscated all of the Fanjul family holdings.

Alfonso “Alfie” Fanjul, along with his brothers, Jose “Pepe” Alexander and Andres, are the principal owners and managers of Flo-Sun.

The Fanjul family’s sugar holdings in Florida and the Dominican Republic total more than 400,000 acres, operated by a family of companies under the corporate umbrella of Flo-Sun, Inc. The Fanjul family holds a majority interest in three other sugar refineries in the United States and owns companies employing over 20,000 people in the Dominican Republic. The Fanjul sugar operation is spread out over a number oflarge farms in the Everglades Agricultural Area around the southern edge of Lake Okeechobee. It includes Okeelanta Corporation, Osceola Farms, the Atlantic Sugar Association, King Sugar Corporation, New Hope Sugar Company, Closter Farms, and more.

Flo-Sun operates both sugar mills and a sugar refinery that turns out ready-to-eat sugar that is sold directly to consumers. Other refined sugar is packed into sacks bearing the label of Flo-Sun’s own brand, Florida Crystals.

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Alfonso Fanjul and J. Pepe Fanjul

Alfonso Fanjul and J. Pepe Fanjul have been an integral part of agriculture in Florida and their communities for more than 50 years. Their numerous contributions and the success of their business endeavors have contributed to the betterment of agriculture in the Everglades Agricultural Area and in the state of Florida.

The Fanjul family founded Florida Crystals Corporation in 1960 as a sugarcane farming and milling company in Palm Beach County. Alfonso Fanjul serves as chairman of the board and CEO of both Fanjul Corp. and Florida Crystals, which farms 190,000 acres in Palm Beach County. The company owns and operates two sugar mills, a sugar refinery, a rice mill, a packaging and distribution center and the largest biomass renewable power plant in North America. Pepe Fanjul is vice chairman, chief operating officer and president of the companies.

The two have been members of Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida almost from its inception. They and other Glades farmers formed the influential trade association, the Florida Sugar Cane League, and the joint marketing cooperatives for the sales of raw sugar and molasses. In 1998, the Fanjul brothers partnered with the Cooperative to buy a sugar refinery in Yonkers, N.Y., to become a totally vertically integrated company. Today, that company, ASR Group, is the largest cane sugar refiner and marketer in the world.

In addition to the farming interests, Florida Crystals’ land portfolio extends to residential and commercial real estate. The Fanjuls also pioneered production of organic sugar cane and rice in South Florida – a major challenge in a subtropical climate. Presently, Florida Crystals continues to be the only producer of organic cane sugar products 100 percent made in the USA – grown, harvested and milled in Florida.

Over the decades, the two South Florida leaders have been influential in local, state and national politics, helping to shape sound farm and environmental policies. Just as important, they are deeply committed to the communities in the EAA. The family founded and strongly supports New Hope Charities, which provides day care, health and education services for Pahokee and surrounding areas.

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The video profiles of the inductees from 1980 through 2017 were produced by the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Florida. More information is available at: https://www.ifas.ufl.edu

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Alfonso Fanjul

About Alfonso Fanjul

Alfonso Fanjul is Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Fanjul Corp. and Florida Crystals Corporation. Florida Crystals farms 187,000 acres of land in Palm Beach County where it also owns two sugar mills, a sugar refinery, a rice mill and a packaging and distribution center.  The company produces renewable energy in its biomass power plant, the largest in North America. Florida Crystals with its subsidiary, American Sugar Refining, the world’s largest sugar refining company, has an annual production capacity of 7 million tons of sugar.  Across North America, its sugar is marketed through its Domino®, C&H®, Florida Crystals® and Redpath® brands. In Europe, the company sells its sugar under the Tate & Lyle® brand.

Alfonso Fanjul, also known as Alfy Fanjul, founded what is now Fanjul Corp. in South Florida in 1960.

He also serves as Chairman, CEO and President of Central Romana Corporation, which is engaged in sugar production, real estate and luxury resort operations, including Casa de Campo, in the Dominican Republic.

Alfonso Fanjul is a co-founder of Mission International Rescue Charities in the Dominican Republic, a member of The Florida Council of 100, a trustee of the University of Miami, a former director of Pennzoil Co. and Florida Power & Light Co.

Alfonso Fanjul is a graduate of Fordham University, where he also received an honorary doctorate degree in May 2010.

Home sweet home: Sugar baron Alexander Fanjul buys Jupiter house for $5M

Jupiter has also attracted Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, who have each bought homes

A GOP-supporting Florida sugar baron closed on a sweet deal in Jupiter where he’ll be close to two scions of former President Donald Trump.

A trust managed by Florida Crystals senior vice-president Alexander Fanjul paid $5 million for a house at 18241 Perigon Way, according to records.

The sellers are John and Janyce Brown, who paid $1.8 million for the four-bedroom, three-bathroom home in 2012, records show. The 5,054-square-foot house was built in 1993.

Fanjul and his brothers, Alfonso “Alfy” Fanjul Jr., José “Pepe” Fanjul, and Andres Fanjul, own one of the largest sugar producing conglomerates in the country. The Fanjuls are also real estate developers in South Florida and the Dominican Republic, where they developed and own La Romana International Airport and several resorts in Casa de Campo.

Locally, FCI Residential, the development arm of Florida Crystals, built a 245-apartment project in Hialeah , a 271-unit apartment building in Palmetto Bay , and a 308-unit residential community in Coconut Creek . Founded in 2012, FCI Residential has developed more than 4,500 apartment units in South Florida, according to the company’s website.

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Fanjul’s new acquisition is in a city where Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump recently planted their roots. In March, the 45th president’s namesake and his girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle bought a six-bedroom house in Jupiter’s Admirals Cove for $9.7 million . Two months later, his brother, Eric, and wife Lara Trump paid $3.2 million for a four-bedroom home in the Trump National Golf Club community.

The Fanjul brothers are prolific donors to Republican and Democratic political candidates and committees. In 2020, Alexander Fanjul donated a combined $78,000 to GOP congressional contenders, including $15,000 to PACs supporting Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, both of whom lost reelection to the U.S. Senate in a Jan. 5 runoff, according to Federal Elections Commission reports.

He’s also given $19,000 to Republican committees for the 2022 midterm election, including $2,900 to Congressman Carlos Gimenez, the former mayor of Miami-Dade County.

Jose Fanjul, a staunch Republican who sold his Faena House condo for $5.2 million earlier this year, donated a total of $1.1 million to a Donald Trump superPAC between 2019 and 2020.

Alfonso Fanjul, on the other hand, is a hardcore Democrat. For the 2020 election, he gave $279,900 to federal Democratic committees, including $37,500 to the Nancy Pelosi Victory Fund, according to the FEC.

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Alfonso fanjul.

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Alfonso Fanjul is the CEO of Fanjul Corp., a sugar harvesting and refining company that produces Domino Sugar, Florida Crystals and other sugar brands. U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) credits the Fanjul family "with raising money and helping him establish political connections during a critical time in his 2010 Senate race." [1]

In 1959, Alfonso Fanjul left Cuba as a young man when Fidel Castro's regime began taking control of private sugar plantations. The Fanjul family emigrated to the United States where they built Florida Crystals, a large sugar producing and refining company. While in the United States, Fanjul became an influential supporter of sanctions against Castro's Cuba and was "one of the principal funders of the U.S. anti-Castro movement." [2] Vanity Fair linked Fanjul and his family to the strongest of the anti-Castro elements in Miami, Fla. : "They were major supporters of the late Jorge Mas Canosa, the ruthless Miami leader of the anti-Castro movement, who made a fortune in telecommunications and construction in Florida." [3]

Fanjul and his brother Pepe also supported U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) since his first run for the Senate against former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (R). According to the Chicago Tribune , "An early fundraiser at the family's Upper East Side apartment helped Rubio amass enough of a war chest to be taken seriously in the race, and Pepe, over dinner on his boat in the Hamptons, introduced Rubio to Rudy Giuliani, who later gave an endorsement." [4]

In 2014, Fanjul indicated a desire to reopen relations with Cuba when he told The Washington Post , "One day we hope that the United States and Cuba would find a way so the whole Cuban community could be able to live and work together." [2] Fanjul's statements were sharply criticized by Florida's Cuban American Republicans and by presidential candidate Marco Rubio : "Senator Rubio was surprised and disappointed to read about Alfonso Fanjul's new position on the Cuban trade embargo. We should not ignore the systemic violations of human rights in Cuba for the sake of opening up new business opportunities." [5]

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Alfonso Fanjul - Google News

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• Florida Crystals
• ↑ The Washington Post , "Rubio 'surprised and disappointed' by sugar tycoon’s position on Cuba," February 4, 2014
• ↑ 2.0 2.1 The Washington Post , "Sugar tycoon Alfonso Fanjul now open to investing in Cuba under 'right circumstances,'" February 2, 2014
• ↑ Vanity Fair , "In the Kingdom of Big Sugar," February 2011
• ↑ Chicago Tribune , "Rubio's deep sugar ties frustrate conservatives," January 28, 2016
• ↑ Miami New Times , "Sugar Baron Alfonso Fanjul Open to Doing Business in Cuba; Diaz-Balart and Rubio Rip Back," February 4, 2014
• Pages using DynamicPageList3 dplreplace parser function
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• Agriculture

The High Human Cost of America’s Sugar Habit

Low pay, chemical exposure, and a life of debt..

By Sandy Tolan with Euclides Cordero Nuel; photos by Pedro Farias-Nardi September 17, 2021

Pedro Farias-Nardi

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It was 5 a.m. and still dark as we rolled west out of Santo Domingo, on a cool morning in May 2019. We rode through the tourist zone, past whitewashed Spanish colonial buildings, pointing our truck toward the Haitian border. A sliver of waning moon hung in the eastern sky.

After three decades, I’d returned to the Dominican Republic, pulled back by the haunting memory of a Haitian child. All stick legs and sunken eyes, he stood barefoot and shirtless under a fierce and pounding sun, surrounded by endless fields of Dominican sugarcane. His name was Lulu Pierre; he was 14 years old. I’d met him in March 1991, when I went to a Dominican state-run sugar work camp, known as a batey , to investigate widespread human trafficking and forced labor in the harvest. I’d visited a transit camp where Haitians were secretly processed. I’d read the human rights reports documenting the Dominican military’s role in transporting Haitian men, and sometimes children, to the harvest. But now I was seeing it for myself.

Just days before, soldiers had abducted Lulu at a market on the Dominican–Haitian border, thrown him into a pickup, and dumped him at the camp in the middle of the night. “If you want to eat,” the bosses told him, “you have to cut the cane.”

But Lulu couldn’t do it. He’d given up and turned to fishing in pesticide-ridden ditches beside the fields. “My mother and father don’t know where I am,” the child told us. “I want to go home.” Alan Weisman, then my reporting partner, and I gave a Catholic relief worker the equivalent of about $80 to try to get him back to his family.

Listen to a podcast version of this story produced by  Reveal . 

We never learned what happened. But I’d thought about Lulu Pierre ever since, determined one day to return and find out if he ever made it.

“I think we will find Lulu,” declared Euclides Cordero Nuel from the passenger seat. It was growing light as I eased our truck onto two-lane blacktop, moving past lush stands of mango, tamarind, and pineapple, the flatlands turning to rolling hills as we neared the border. The island of Hispaniola, where Christopher Columbus first planted sugarcane in the New World, is divided into two nations: the Dominican Republic to the east, and Haiti to the west. Euclides, a Haitian Dominican journalist who agreed to help me look for Lulu, was 2 years old when I was last here. He grew up on a batey and cut cane at age 14 so he could buy shoes for high school. “I shared them with my brother,” he told me as we rolled along.

Over the last two years, Euclides and I mounted a broad search. We traveled to the market where Lulu had been snatched away from his family. We’d visited his Haitian hometown, stopping in at United Nations offices, city hall, the birth registry, and radio stations that agreed to broadcast live appeals. We zigzagged between the two countries on a road so broken that in long stretches it would have been faster to walk. And we made repeated trips to the old state-run bateyes, many now sold off and privatized, that had held Haitians like Lulu against their will. We never abandoned our mission, but we came to realize the story wasn’t just about Lulu. It was about the 68,000-some Haitian cañeros still in the fields, and their living and working conditions, especially under the island’s biggest plantation holder: Central Romana. Owned in part by brothers Alfonso and Pepe Fanjul, Cuban exiles who are now billionaire Florida sugar barons, Central Romana sugarcane is cut by Haitians, crushed and poured as raw sugar into the holds of vessels, and shipped to the Fanjuls’ ASR Domino refinery in Baltimore harbor. Then it’s packaged into 4-pound Domino bags, sent in bulk to industrial bakeries, and shipped by rail to be made into Hershey bars and other chocolates, cookies, and Halloween candies.

There’s no doubt Dominican sugar production has improved since I met Lulu. But according to government sources and human rights and labor advocates, Central Romana is most resistant to changing the deplorable conditions that have long plagued the industry. The company ships more than 200 million pounds of sugar to the US every year—far more than any other Dominican grower—and insists it treats its workers “with respect.” Public relations director Jorge Sturla says the company provides laborers opportunities to “improve their lives through secure, honest work.” The Florida-based Fanjul Corporation offered a statement claiming that “Central Romana is a highly respected corporate citizen in the Dominican Republic, and takes pride in its reputation for civic activities and ethical business practices.”

We came to see for ourselves.  

We rattled down a long gravel road, straight as a string. On either side stood 8-foot-high stands of undulating cane, their weedy tops blowing in the wind. A train whistle signaled cars hauling stalks to the mill at company headquarters near the port at La Romana. Our destination: Cacata, or what Central Romana calls its “model” batey.

Cacata is one of about 100, according to a local missionary organization’s estimate, isolated company camps scattered among Central Romana’s 166,000 acres of sugarcane—a tract almost as big as New York City. Most of the workers and their families live in these bateyes, rising in the morning to work the cane in the punishing heat, clearing weeds, slashing and spraying the stalks. Nearly all are men of Haitian descent. Some were trafficked back in the day of Lulu Pierre; others were born here and live stateless; and others came from Haiti more recently, paying buscones to sneak them across the border. For years, the government has resisted providing legal status to people of Haitian heritage in the country, even those born there. An estimated 200,000 people, who for generations have been demeaned by race and class, are stateless.

For the men in their camps, Central Romana is the state. Their bateyes are patrolled by armed company police, empowered to evict. Central Romana owns the land where the Haitians work, the railcars where they weigh and load the cane stalks, and the dwellings where they sleep. They are miles from the nearest Dominican town not controlled by the company. Central Romana repeatedly refused requests for an interview or a tour to help me understand how it operates today. But two workers at a local charity founded by Alfy and Pepe Fanjul’s sister, Lian, spoke glowingly of Cacata, urging us to visit.

In Cacata we walk the quiet streets, laid out in a grid about a mile long. At first we see modest well-kept houses, kids playing stickball, a child singing to Jesus, families relaxing—the kinds of uplifting images promoted on Central Romana’s website. Many homes have electricity, and new potable water taps are accessible to all.

But as we walk deeper into Batey Cacata, we reach a grim-looking line of concrete barracks and, behind that, rows of dilapidated housing. Nearby, the Dominican supervisor lives in a large, solidly built house with a front yard big enough to fit several cane workers’ homes. “You can see, in Cacata, there’s a segmentation of the people,” Euclides says.

We keep walking. Soon we meet two old men sitting on broken plastic chairs in front of a slumping tin-roof shack. Euclides greets them warmly. After welcoming us in their native Creole, Julio and Cardenas (they asked us not to use their real names, for fear of retaliation) tell us they remember the horrible days of massive human trafficking and child labor: By the time I was last here, in 1991, they’d already been on Central Romana’s plantation for a decade.

Much of that chaos is in the past, they told us. Because of international pressure, few if any children still work the fields. The brutal trafficking rings, run in large part by the Dominican military, have been disbanded. But for Julio and Cardenas not much has changed. They are paid a little more than $3 for each metric ton, or 2,200 pounds, they harvest. “On a good day, I can cut a ton,” maybe a little more, Cardenas tells us. He’s almost 80, and Julio isn’t much younger. Yet even though Central Romana deducts government pension funds from their paychecks, they say they’ve never seen one peso.

“It’s not my fault I’m working,” Cardenas says. “I made requests for my pension, but I don’t have it.” Without proper working papers, they are trapped in the batey and too vulnerable to seek other work.

We ask the men if their bosses treat them well. Cardenas chokes back tears and stabs the hard ground with the point of his machete. “I’m not good,” he finally tells us. “You can see how they treat us here as a Haitian. Now if you have to go to the hospital, you have to have your own money to spend on your sickness…If you don’t have money, you’re going to die.”

Just then two armed men pull up on a motorcycle. They’re from Central Romana’s private security force. “Señor, what authorization do you have to be asking questions?” the lead officer asks us. “You are not allowed to be here without the authorization of the company. This is a private batey.”

“You guys have to understand,” the second guard adds. “We’re protecting interests here.”

Batey residents, with one man showing a burn scar.

Central Romana has plenty of interests to protect.

At the top of the company’s sugar chain: the Fanjul brothers, Alfonso and Pepe, who acquired it in 1984. The wealth generated by their 100,000 metric tons of annual imports to the United States, built on the sweat of men like Julio and Cardenas, has helped make them billionaires and build worlds of luxury. In the middle of Central Romana’s cane fields sits the Casa de Campo resort, a playground for A-list celebrities, European royalty, and former US presidents, who can rent villas, shoot pigeons, play golf and polo, or pilot a yacht into the sparkling Caribbean. The brothers live in seaside mansions in West Palm Beach, where Alfy also keeps a $23 million, 157-foot yacht. Pepe is partial to long stays at a London hotel, paying thousands of dollars per night. The family hosts charity balls, doling out millions to charter schools and day care centers, and tens of millions to politicians, who oversee government programs that repay them many times over. Speaking on the Senate floor, John McCain once called them the “first family of corporate welfare.”

Pepe Fanjul, Jr and Pepe Fanjul, Sr.

Fanjul family members at their Casa de Campo resort, January 1990.

The wealth that Central Romana throws off gives it a kind of political and economic autonomy in the Dominican Republic; essentially it’s a state within a state, with deep ties to the country’s governing and commercial elite. The president of the Fanjuls’ Dominican operations later became the country’s vice president, foreign minister, and ambassador to the US. The former Dominican president repeatedly made use of the Fanjuls’ private jet.

As a practical matter, “The company is the judiciary. They are the police. They are the ones who rule over everyone’s life,” explains Christopher Hartley, a Catholic priest from Spain who became an advocate for the cane workers while posted in the Dominican Republic. “They decide who can stay in the barracks, who has to leave the barracks.”

Despite such restrictions, over the course of six trips, Euclides and I managed to visit more than two dozen of the company’s work camps, often not stopping for long, trying to keep two steps ahead of the armed guards. The original inhabitants of Hispaniola, the native Taino, defined “batey” as a village center, a gathering place. Today, the bateyes are outposts of flimsy wooden shacks and concrete barracks with cracked and crumbling walls. A mattress, sometimes just a sheet, on a bare floor, with a few clothes drooping from a piece of rope. A kerosene lamp or a candle melted down to the nub. Roofs riddled with holes.

Outside the cramped, dimly lit homes, just hard earth; when it rains, the dwellings become islands between massive puddles. In many bateyes, there are no fruit trees, not even subsistence gardens. Despite company denials, families in at least a dozen bateyes told us they’re not allowed to grow food. In a country with near-universal access to electricity, only one in 10 of Central Romana’s bateyes have power, by a local missionary organization’s estimate. There is little official documentation of conditions in the bateyes; seven Dominican government institutions failed to provide us with such statistics. The country’s Washington embassy sent us a statement boasting of great strides tackling poverty, but with no details on bateyes. One of the few sources of hard data is a 2013 report from the Dominican Ministry of Public Health, co-sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Agency for International Development, which found sharply elevated levels of tuberculosis, HIV, child malnutrition, and diarrhea. Another study indicated that nearly half the adult population in the bateyes have never attended school.

Perhaps all this is what Central Romana and its armed security are trying to hide.

A Central Romana batey.

A family’s room. The parents use a bed; the children use a foam mattress on the floor.

Inside a house in a batey owned by Central Romana.

In 1997, Hartley  took charge of a tiny parish in the Dominican Republic surrounded by cane fields.

“I’d been trained to say mass and baptize babies,” Hartley recalls. Though he had previously worked alongside Mother Teresa, gaining experience among the desperately poor, he says that until he came to the Dominican Republic, “‘grassroots’ wasn’t even in my vocabulary.” But after seeing conditions facing the country’s cane workers, he began to organize and speak out. “These people live, are born, and die in this paradise,” Hartley told a Canadian documentary team a few years after arriving. “But they live in it as slaves.”

By the end of the year, Hartley had partnered with Dominican human rights lawyer Noemí Méndez, who was born in a batey. Together they toured camps controlled by the powerful Vicini family, where his Haitian parishioners worked, and talked to cañeros about their rights and distributed copies of the Dominican Constitution. They both began to get death threats; Hartley says he would receive them until they drove him from the country in 2006.

Hartley eventually accepted posts in Ethiopia and South Sudan, but he remains active in the issue. In 2009, he joined forces with Charlotte Ponticelli, who had just stepped down as the Labor Department’s deputy undersecretary for International Affairs, a bureau known as ILAB. Two years earlier, she’d seen Hartley in a documentary and came away impressed. “A brave man,” she says. “Hardworking, devoted, dedicated, saintly.” ILAB was dealing with multiple other global trafficking issues at the time, but as she was leaving office, she wrote to Hartley offering her support. He promptly accepted.

Ponticelli guided Hartley through a Washington maze, suggesting elected officials and former colleagues across government he could meet with. In 2011, she helped Hartley petition the Labor Department to enforce provisions in the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement, a 2005 treaty that compelled the Dominican Republic to follow International Labor Organization regulations on forced labor. Leaked US diplomatic cables from the period of CAFTA’s drafting reported that the agreement “infuriated sugar barons” in the Dominican Republic and singled out Pepe Fanjul for his efforts to “ sabotage ” it.

It took two years, but in 2013 the Department of Labor released a 42-page report citing Hartley’s petition, which had alleged a wide range of abuses, including “deplorable and unsanitary living conditions” and the denial of medical care and pensions. The government’s report also cited its own interviews with 71 cane workers in documenting evidence of forced and child labor, unsafe working conditions, and inadequate wages. Within six months, ILAB would begin sending monitoring teams to the Dominican Republic.

A boy walks through corn. Many batey residents told us growing food was banned. 

A house in Cacata, a “model” batey, where some electricity is available. 

Ponticelli was floored. “It was a David-versus-Goliath situation,” she recalled. “He was one person that submitted a petition based on his personal experience. And lo and behold his petition was accepted and the US government took on the obligation to look into those labor violations to point out what needed to be done.”

Following the initial report, monitoring teams continued to travel to interview cañeros without the presence of company bosses. By 2018, the Department reported the Dominican Republic had made “positive steps towards addressing” some labor issues, but noted that “efforts and progress, however, continue to vary significantly across companies.” I asked ILAB for more details, but it has consistently declined to identify potential offenders. Hartley, once thrilled with the Labor Department’s stance, has grown skeptical.

“They have videos, photographs, interviews. If the members of the Department of Labor who have regularly gone down to the plantations of the Fanjul family had the freedom to speak out and say what their eyes have seen,” Hartley told me, it wouldn’t be necessary to get comment from human rights advocates like him.

“If people could see at what price they put sugar in their coffee every morning, they would be absolutely horrified at the living and working conditions of thousands and thousands of men, women, and children. It is horrendous to think that the blood, sweat, and tears of Haitian migrant workers have been slaving away for generations,” he says, “so that we could put sugar on our table.”

Workers preparing Central Romana’s fields for the upcoming sugar crop.

Stove making.

On November 19, 2018, Raoul Hervil, an herbicide fumigator for Central Romana, was spraying chemicals on sugarcane crops when he began feeling light-headed. He was breathing heavily. Raoul, a slight man with warm brown eyes in an angular face, eventually fell to the ground, gasping. Co-workers rushed him to the hospital. It would be his last day working sugarcane for Central Romana.

Twenty years earlier, Raoul had left the eroded lands of Gressier, on Port-au-Prince Bay, along Haiti’s northern coast, to seek work in the Dominican Republic. He landed in Central Romana fields near the eastern edge of the island. Raoul got married and raised four kids on a few dollars a day, eventually settling in a rickety green wooden shack in Central Romana’s Batey 80. That’s where Euclides and I met him, as young men just back from the fields played a game of pickup baseball in the dirt streets behind us.

Raoul started spraying herbicides for Central Romana the year before his collapse. He says they made him feel sick with headaches, flu, fever, and rashes all over his body—a range of symptoms all of the nearly 30 other fumigators we spoke with reported suffering at least in part. But for months, he continued working. “The product cause me a lot of damage,” Raoul says, incessantly scratching his knees and legs as we sat on stools outside his home. “I feel bad the whole day long.”

Medical records show that while Raoul worked as a fumigator, he had already been diagnosed with tuberculosis and HIV. It isn’t clear whether Central Romana supervisors knew about his illnesses or his complaints about the spray; the company did not respond to our queries about what it knew of Raoul’s condition. In a corporate history, the company claims it treats “sugarcane cutters and their families with respect,” providing them “health care and medical coverage at no charge.” Despite this, Central Romana doctors failed to examine Raoul, and he wasn’t taken to Central Romana’s state-of-the-art hospital. (Casa de Campo guests who fall ill are promised “priority attention” at the facility.)

Raoul was surviving thanks to the generosity of his impoverished neighbors and occasional payments for hauling trash. We asked him if Central Romana had provided any money to help with his health. He laughed bitterly. “Never!” he says. “They never give me anything.”

Most of the Central Romana fumigators we interviewed described working with inadequate, broken, or missing protective equipment. “Many times, I go an entire week without a mask,” Raoul’s neighbor, a fellow fumigator, told us, showing us a large, oozing rash around his mouth, which he attributed to chemical exposure. “They always say, ‘Tomorrow we’ll bring you a new one.’ But tomorrow they don’t bring anything. Or there will be holes in the coveralls. Again they say, ‘Tomorrow. Tomorrow we’re going to bring the new one,’ and they don’t.”

Forty-one Central Romana fumigators are part of litigation brought by Robert Vance, a Philadelphia-based plaintiff’s attorney with experience using US courts to get settlements for people in the Dominican Republic harmed by US companies.

One afternoon when Euclides and I were working in the bateyes, Vance and his legal team arrived in Guaymate, a town beyond the reach of Central Romana security. After piling out of a line of SUVs and setting up a makeshift office under a portico in the town square, they took additional statements from fumigators.

Vance has filed in Tennessee federal court, where pesticide manufacturer Drexel is based, as well as in Pennsylvania , alleging “reckless disregard” in exposing the workers to damaging chemicals “motivated by simple greed.” In 1997, the Environmental Protection Agency determined that one compound the company has sold to Central Romana, diuron, likely causes cancer. His motions cite science indicating Drexel’s pesticides pose risks of allergic reaction and damage to the lungs, brain, and digestive tract, while cataloging workers’ complaints of “nausea, abdominal cramps, vomiting, diarrhea,” and breathing difficulties. Many of these symptoms parallel what fumigators reported to Euclides and me.

Another Vance lawsuit filed in a Florida federal court targets the Fanjuls over the eviction of workers from one batey. “Fanjul Corporation is directly responsible for housing conditions of the bateyes, from where the cañeros and the fumigadores live to the use of the pesticides,” Vance told me. “They have never been really required to do what is ethically and morally right by their employees because no one has forced them.”

Raoul might have been in line for payments from Vance’s lawsuits, should they ever come. But his own lung issues proved too much. This June, when Euclides and I returned to Batey 80, a group of four young women sharing a wooden bench gave us the news: Sometime near the end of December 2020, Raoul Hervil died of respiratory failure in his shack. He was 50 years old.

They agreed to show us Raoul’s grave. We drove a few minutes to the Guaymate graveyard, where one of them, Mélida, pointed to a bare wooden stake, painted white, which she recognized only by its alignment with a crack in the cemetery wall. “It’s a shame, a man like Raoul who worked many years in sugarcane,” she said. “Just buried in the dirt. No cross. This makes me very sad.”

When I first came to the Dominican Republic 30 years ago evidence of forced labor in the sugar harvest was glaringly obvious: Men with shotguns guarded locked gates to trap workers in the cane fields. But the International Labor Organization’s indicators of forced labor include more subtle abuses like the hazardous working conditions, low pay, and other issues cane workers regularly describe today.

“We’re talking about coercive forces that are psychological, coercive forces that are driven by debt,” said Duncan Jepson, managing director of the international anti-trafficking group Liberty Shared. “And that’s slightly more subtle than methods of violence.”

One Sunday morning, Euclides and I went to a batey for an Evangelical church service, under a patchwork of red and blue tarps affixed to wooden poles. We’d been invited by a couple I’ll call Efrain and Noni. Noni paced back and forth before the congregation, microphone in her hand, leaning back, giving it everything.

In contrast to his wife, Efrain sat quietly in a folding chair. He’s a “mixer,” part of a team of fumigators who sometimes use sticks ripped from trees to stir chemicals in open 55-gallon drums. Despite Central Romana’s promises to provide health care to workers, Efrain told us he has to pay for much of it himself, which has pushed him into spiraling debt. Together with expenses caused by his brother’s thrombosis, he now owes 30,000 pesos—about $600, or nearly three months’ pay. The lender charges 10 percent per week, Efrain explains: “If you borrow 1,000 pesos, you have to give this person 100 pesos per week in interest.” Yearly, that adds up to 520 percent interest.

More than two dozen cane workers told us their salaries are so low that they’ve turned to money lenders in nearby towns. A municipal firefighter who has a side business making loans to cane workers explained that while Central Romana doesn’t operate the loan shark rings, the company’s low wages leave workers desperate and willing to pay exorbitant rates. One of the ILO’s elements of forced labor is “fraudulent debt from which workers cannot escape.”

It’s a brutal cycle, Efrain tells us. The canecutters are in debt until they die.

Myrthos Pierre Louis says Central Romana paid him a year’s wages after a sugarcane cart accident cost him the use of his legs, but nothing since.

Sugar is not the only thing that’s made the Fanjuls so rich. Their profits are sweetened thanks to the politics of the United States. Not only does Central Romana benefit from a tariff program under which the Dominican Republic gets a greater share than any other sugar-exporting nation—with the company filling nearly two-thirds of that quota—but it also profits from a congressionally authorized federal price-support program that inflates the value of each pound by about 10 cents. Vincent Smith, an agricultural economist and critic of the program, estimates the Fanjul family is “getting at least $150 million a year” in net benefits from the program, with another $25 million going to Central Romana’s imports. “That’s a very substantial concentration of benefits on a very small number of folks,” Smith says.

Some of that money goes back to seed the American political system. Over the last 20 years, Big Sugar has spent more than $220 million on campaign contributions and lobbying to sustain the price-supports and oppose stricter dietary guidelines, with 40 percent of that, according to OpenSecrets, coming from Fanjul-affiliated companies and lobbying groups. Smith, citing Federal Election Commission data, points out that the Fanjul empire and allied sugar organizations spend 10 million every year on lobbying and campaign contributions. “They’re not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts,” says Sheila Krumholz, OpenSecrets’ executive director. “It’s a very good investment.”

Alfonso Fanjul, Judith Giuliani, Rudy Giuliani, and Raysa Fanjul at a charity ball in 2017.

The Fanjuls are famous for giving across the aisle, a habit that has helped protect their government payouts no matter which party holds the upper hand. Alfy aligns with the Democrats; Pepe with the GOP. Trump’s billionaire Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and his wife have been guests at the Fanjuls’ Casa de Campo mansion. “The Fanjuls are the most delightful hosts,” Hilary Geary Ross said of Pepe and Emilia Fanjul in the society column she wrote for a Palm Beach magazine. The top recipient of Fanjul largesse serving today—with more than $280,000 across his Senate career—is Florida’s Marco Rubio, a key supporter of the price-support program. In his memoir, An American Son , Rubio describes his close relationship with the Fanjuls, including a dinner hosted on their boat, and a “Labor Day weekend in the Hamptons, where many of their friends and major Republican donors would spend the holiday.”

Alfy Fanjul moves among powerful Democrats, historically, none more than the Clintons, who have spent time at Casa de Campo, where Bill golfed. Perhaps the most famous example of the Fanjuls’ access to power was captured in the Starr report: Alfy Fanjul, upset over Vice President Al Gore’s presidential campaign pledge to tax sugar producers a penny per pound to preserve the Everglades, reached Bill Clinton by phone in the Oval Office as he made a failed attempt to end his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. In a written statement, a Labor Department spokesperson insisted that the Fanjuls’ political power has not shaped its actions: “DOL has not modified its position on the Dominican Republic as a result of any public or private actors attempting to influence it.”

A woman selling charcoal, which is widely used in the unnelectrified battles.

A local Dominican merchant visits a batey with plantains.

Forced labor in other global agricultural supply chains is coming under growing scrutiny. Countries exporting cotton, seafood, and palm oil have all been subject to bans from US Customs and Border Protection under a 1930s law that blocks importing goods produced by forced labor.

“This isn’t like sex trafficking, for instance, where the business is completely criminal and illicit,” said Jepson, who successful fought to block the United States from importing palm oil made by one of the world’s biggest producers. “These are businesses that are publicly listed, perhaps listed in multiple stock exchanges.”

In recent years, Mars and Hershey have adopted extensive policies on sustainability and human rights, particularly around cocoa and palm oil. While they say little about sugar, advocates focused on the cane workers are fighting to change that. Last year, activists and clergy caught wind that Central Romana was applying for membership in a trade organization, Bonsucro, that includes plantations and end users like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, Mars, and Hershey, and which has developed a rigorous code governing environmental and employer conduct. They sent letters and documentation of the company’s record to Bonsucro leadership, urging them to deny the application. “For many years we have faced a strong problem of human rights violations against Dominican and Haitian families by Central Romana,” wrote Miguel Ángel Gullón, a member of Dominicans for Justice and Peace, in a February 2020 letter that urged a “profound rejection” of the company. Two months later, Bonsucro turned Central Romana down, citing allegations that, “if proven, could put Central Romana in breach” of Bonsucro’s code of conduct. Today, the company touts certification from an alternative group called ProTerra.

Central Romana seems to have no difficulty finding customers. Nearly 1 in 7 tons of raw sugar arriving at the Baltimore facility of American Sugar Refining—the Fanjul corporation that owns Domino, C&H, and other processors—originates in the La Romana port. Hershey, whose iconic chocolate factories are only about 90 miles from the Baltimore refinery, is one of many companies that sources sugar there. After summarizing our findings documenting the workers’ conditions and following up with more than a dozen emails and calls, the chocolate-maker declined our requests for an interview and issued a general statement saying the company wouldn’t tolerate forced labor or unsafe conditions. But companies can’t deny where their supplies come from. Traceability reports allow end users to determine the origins of the sugar they buy. Nor is there doubt that Central Romana’s sugar is made by men like Julio and Cardenas, working up to their 80s for $3 a ton; like Noni and Efrain, sick and stuck in spiraling debt; like Raoul, whose body lies under a stick in the cemetery near Batey 80.    

On the map, the “Carretera Internacional” appears to wind back and forth between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, providing a supposed shortcut to our destination: Batey 8, once a state-run sugar plantation in the Barahona province. In truth, it’s a nearly impassable dirt road with deep ruts that kept our average speed around 10 miles an hour.

We wove between the two nations: On our left, lush, sloping grassy washes of the Dominican Republic, not a building or person in sight. On the right, the fallen hillsides of Haiti, badly eroded, nearly devoid of trees, where families waved as we passed. This was the territory many Haitians left behind to work on the Dominican Republic’s sugar plantations. In recent years, they come voluntarily, out of desperation. Not long ago, many, like Lulu Pierre, essentially had been sold into bondage.

The road’s end brought pavement as smooth as glass. We zipped along, arriving as night fell. Go see the oldest man in the batey, someone told us, pointing behind a low brown row house. If anyone knows what happened to Lulu, it would be him.

Soft laughter mixed with crickets. Merengue wafted from radios. Here, on a concrete porch in a red plastic chair, we found an 85-year-old man named Rene. Euclides and I pulled up a couple of cement blocks to sit and tell our story. He listened, then said without pause, “Yes. I remember Lulu Pierre.”

Rene confirmed that Lulu was a victim of a human trafficking operation run by buscones for the Dominican state sugar council, aided by Dominican military. He recalled how Lulu, like many others, arrived from a clandestine border crossing in the dead of night, on a bus stuffed with 60-some Haitians. Some were tricked, he said—“told they were going to make a lot of money here”—and others kidnapped.

Until now, my search for Lulu had nearly gone dry. Birth registry officials in Haiti had even convinced us that Lulu wasn’t his given name. Despite all that, I now sat face to face with an old man ready to answer questions I’d been asking nearly half my life. What happened to the child? Did those long-ago efforts to help Lulu escape make a difference?

Rene said they had. A Catholic clergy member, Brother Leon Delaney, had escorted Lulu back to the border town of Jimani. From there, Rene was certain, Lulu made it back home.

We were silent, letting the moment sink in. It was nice to think that Lulu had an emotional reunion with his family. Euclides even imagined a feast of goat meat, French beans, and white rice to celebrate his return. But the story brought us only modest comfort. For by now, we carried the tales of Efrain, Noni, Raoul, and many other cañeros who make sugar to sweeten American coffee and candy. Lulu might have escaped, but what we saw left a bitter taste. 

Listen to a   podcast version  of this story produced for public radio by Reveal .

This story was published in partnership with the Center for Investigative Reporting and made possible with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting . Additional reporting by Michael Montgomery.

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