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Trump 2.0 is so relentlessly mobster that it can be difficult to reconcile with the historic and enduring lawlessness of the American capitalist class. Yet the Fanjul family history reminds us of this. For well over a century, this clan has wielded enormous influence in our corridors of power. The Fanjul sugar dynasty is the direct descendant and probably the wealthiest remaining heir to what a century ago was known as the “Sugar Trust.” Subsidizing the sugar industry might seem perverse today, but in the 19th century a deep reserve of emergency empty calories was viewed as a requirement of proper sovereignty.
In 1984, the family became the biggest landowner in the Dominican Republic for a mere $200 million when what was then Paramount Pictures’ parent company decided to offload a sugar plantation named Central Romana that had been a constant source of negative headlines. Three years earlier, a group of Maryknoll nuns had decided to raise a media shitstorm about the “subhuman” squalor in which the plantation housed its workforce. Most houses had no electricity or drinkable water or even mattresses for sleeping on, latrines were “appalling,” disease and child malnutrition were rampant, and laborers, they said, made on average around $2.50 a day. The Fanjuls were the perfect owners for such an enterprise.
In the four decades since they purchased the plantation, virtually nothing has changed, and that includes the pay. While the company withholds funds for taxes and retirement from workers’ checks, virtually none of them have an immigration status that would enable them to collect such benefits; nearly all are migrants from Haiti who are forced to cut cane essentially until they die. (“Since the acquisition, Central Romana has significantly improved working conditions, benefits, and living conditions of its workers,” a Fanjul family spokesman said in an emailed statement.)
Today, the Fanjuls make much, much more money selling sugar than what the global market will bear, thanks to the resiliency of those late-19th-century sugar subsidies, along with a powerful cocktail of market dominance and old-fashioned price-fixing. It is unclear and possibly unquantifiable how much the Fanjuls make directly from these subsidies, but estimates generally suggest the program costs consumers between $2.5 billion and $4 billion per year, and the Fanjul empire supplies roughly 30 percent of the sugar consumed in America annually.
The Fanjuls have become big donors to President Donald Trump and the Republican Party in recent years, and that investment has seen a return. After exposés and investigations, then-President Joe Biden’s Labor Department formally issued a “withhold release order” blocking Central Romana’s sugar products from entering the country. Within weeks of his inauguration, Trump repealed the ban on Central Romana sugar without explanation. Then, in July, Trump cajoled Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into bestowing the official MAHA seal of approval on a plan to use cane sugar in Coca-Cola’s flagship beverage in lieu of high-fructose corn syrup. Naturally, the Fanjuls were behind the plan, having been patched in six months earlier to an awkward meeting between Trump and Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey. The family has cultivated a political terrain as hospitable to their dreams and desires as Cuba under Fulgencio Batista. |
