Big Sugar Episode 4: Without Sugar There is No Country

Nineteen fifties Cuba, Havana. There's one place, one club where anyone who's anyone can be found.

On a Saturday night, you always want to Tropic Cana. It doesn't matter where you want. You wind up a Tropic Canna because it was world famous and just to walk in and look at it was enough.

It's more than a casino in cabaret. It's a destination nestled within a lush six acre estate.

It was the world's most beautiful nightclub I think of. It has a paradise onto the stars.

You walk into the Tropic Canna ballroom, set within a perfectly manicured rainforest, Palm trees and circle the stage, and advertisement from the time called it luxuriant vegetation.

You thought you were outdoors.

And you look up at the ceiling. It's like an enormous shell, but made of last.

If you look up, you will see the canopy of the trees and the stars. So it was very romantic.

So grab a drink.

The bar had a cage in the back full of colorful Amazonian birds, parrots, cockatoos, tucons, every kind of bird was back there.

You take a sip of your minty sweet Mohito. Relax and you start rubbernecking.

The place was full of celebrities. If you kept walking, you ran into possibly Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Rita Haywarth, Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds, Marlene Dietrich, President John F. Kennedy, Oh jfk Yes, all the American politicians were there, including the presidents.

And who else could you spot with these A listers.

Alongside all these celebrities, there were the sugar barons.

Among the feest people in the country.

For example, defan Hul family.

You might even lay eyes on one Alfonso van Hul, hair slicked, dashing, old school, dressed to the.

Nines, because this is a place where the rich and famous chose to play. My name is Domitilla Fox, I go by Tilly.

Tilly more or less grew up at the Tropicana. Her uncle was the principal owner and her father helped found it. Of course, they'd spend every New Year's Eve in the club, so in nineteen fifty six it seemed like any other celebration to young Tilly.

There was a show and we were sitting at the family table, which was right on the way to the stage. Everybody was happily watching Benny More.

It's all laughter and dancing, peppered with the occasional squawking of one of the bar's resident two k Then, just before midnight, the orchestra is reaching a crescendo, and.

All of a sudden you hear a blast and it sounded like a huge clap of thunder. It was terrifying because I knew it was a bomb. People screaming like, oh my gosh, it's a bomb, la bomba bomba and it was panic. It was chaos. Everybody started running out because you didn't know if there were more bombs in the place.

The explosion came from the ladies bathroom, where there was a woman.

Her arm had come off literally with the bomb.

A revolution was underway. Its ripples would change the world. Not to mention the global sugar industry and the lives of two budding Cuban sugar princes, Alfi Junior and Pepe van Hul, the same men who today in the United States sit at the top of the sugar world, the men behind Florida Crystals. Two of the men, the sugar cane cutters and their lawyers in this story are taking on who are they? Will buckle up? It's going to

Brothers Alfonso and Pepe Fund who will own and farm some of the finest sugar cane fields in the nation, located mostly in Palm Beach County. The family's Florida Crystals Corporation was founded as a sugarcane farming and milling company in nineteen sixty and has been producing high quality sugar for more than fifty years.

The reason I'm putting you through the production music equivalent of hell is so you can hear the voice of Alphi Funhold junior.

People ask me what do you do? What are your professional as a farmer, and sometimes to look at me former, you know, so what I am? I done everything in a farm.

And here's his younger brother and business partner, Pepe fun Hold.

But the company has you know, it's still primarily issuar company that is diversifying to do other things too, and we're very excited about this.

These guys are two of the riches sugar cane growers in the world today. They're in their seventies and eighties and they're billionaires with a bee. Alfi says, they've done everything on a farm. But let's be real. Their pastel socks and gold buckle blofers are serving far more of the shareholder meetings in the boardroom look than hacking away

Yes, when I first met Alfie, he said, this is the first time I've ever spoken in an in depth way to any reporter.

When Vanity Fair journalist Marie Brenner got an interview with Alfie and Pepe van Jul, she knew it was a big deal. These guys rarely interact with the media unless it's fluff videos like the one you just heard, or society columnists snapping photos of them with Meryl Streep and Angelina Jolie at charity Gallas. But he told her.

It is time to try to get our side of the story across.

Marie had been trying for months to get an interview with the sugar magnets. While she was covering the lawsuit in the late nineties and early two thousand.

I had written long, earnest letters saying it's better for you to get your point across, use me to tell your side of the story.

All that perseverance paid off. She was invited to interview Alfie and his brother Pepe several times, including one time aboard their super yacht Crily.

They invited me on their boat.

The press coverage of the case hadn't been flattering for them. There were stories of how the workers were living on their farms in prison like conditions, doing absolutely grueling work, and at the end of the day being underpaid. So Alfie starts telling his side of the.

Story, and he did. He told a compelling story about being a young man in Cuba having been shot at by the Castro forces, his father was arrested.

Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, Before we get to the shooting, the arrests, the bombs. There is so much to unpack here, you see. Even though the fund Hols are known as some of the richest sugarcane growers in the US, that's not where their story starts. It begins in Cuba, where the brothers Alfie and Pepe were born in the nineteen thirties and forties and raised where their family was from. In the nineteen fifties, the Fundhuls were

They were rich boys in the Havana of the nineteen fifties. Their parents would have the Duke of Windsor and the Duchess of Windsor coming to stay with them. They lived in an immense mansion which I've visited on several occasions in Havana, that had been done by the great French decorator Anre Somuel. Was filled with you know, the most beautiful crowned dark and the most beautiful porcels.

One of the Fanhol family houses was like a Cuban version of France's Palace of Versailles. Many of the vast rooms had different themes Neoclassical, Chinese and English. In fact, as a girl, when she wasn't at her family's club, the Tropicana. Tillie Fox hung out there.

Oh my gosh, these houses compared to the greatest States of England.

Don't forget her family owned a famous nightclub. So Tilly had some wild experiences as a little girl.

For example, I remember playing piano with Liberacchi and also Nat King Cole. We would go fishing, would Ernest Hemingway.

Right, Just a day on the boat with Papa Hemingway. But even with all these fantastical experiences, the fan Hul houses stick out in her memory. They were that grand I was used.

To seeing all of this, But I do remember those houses what they looked like. Probably they had about fifteen guest bedrooms that were on huge estates winding staircases is something out of a movie. It was all done with exquisite taste, really spectacular.

But how exactly did the fan whole family get so rich that they were living in what was effectively a palace holding parties for some of the most famous people in the world, even royalty. John Paul Rathbone worked a stint as the Latin America editor at the Financial Times, and sugar is both a professional interest for him.

I'm the author of The Sugar King of Havana, the Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba's last tycoon.

But sugar and Cuba are also personal for John Paul.

So my mother is Cuban who was born in Havana, and.

His great great grandfather actually owned a sugar mill himself.

So my grandfather was a character and he is the family patriarch, the family imagination.

So let's focus on the fun Holes. The fan Holes came from a long line of privilege, partly because they married into sugar. The intertwining family dynasties can get a little confusing, so bear with me here. Around the turn of the twentieth century, they joined forces in holy matrimony

Gami's Manna were very there, were fabulously wealthy. They were one of the fabulously wealthy sugarcraft families.

A sugar c a sugar aristocrat, that's rarefied air.

So when Doman's men the family and the Fanghul family joined it, it was a high society wedding. Essentially, there's a kind of ranking in the gossip columns of the day where the most lavish wedding was called a boler the or a golden wedding, well dressed men and beautifully dressed women dancing in the country club, and all stops pulled out.

The sugar credentials of the Fanhole family were firmly secured by this marriage, and that came with power. If you were a sugar grower, you'd made it to the top. Being part of a sugarcrat family, well, it's the kind of profession that comes in handy when you're trying to get into exclusive restaurants, the kind of profession that allows you to say, don't you know who I am? To Matredes.

Yeah.

I think it's more likely that he probably sprinkled a few drops and said something flattering to her, like, my darling, now I'm giving you a pool of perfume. But it's those kinds of stories that sort of generate the idea of these incredible riches.

Soon after Alfi Vanholt Senor and Lillian Rosa Gomez Mena tied the knot in that high society wedding, the next generation of sugar barons were born in nineteen thirty seven, Alfonso Fanholt Junior, that's Alfi, and seven years later Jose Vanhuld, known as Pepe.

They sent their children to school in the United States, and they gave fantastic parties.

The boys, Pepe and Alfie were sent to America for college. Their new American lives were a long way from the family's sugarcane plantations. Apparently, the fun Holes wanted to emulate the lives of French aristocracy, who lived like royalty and much like their eighteenth century counterparts. The brothers were separated both literally and metaphorically from the backbreaking job of cutting sugarcane that paid for their fine clothes and expensive educations. For many sugarcrats, John Paul says.

The life of the black part of the population and the less well off was completely hidden to them, and they were incurious about it. I'm not aware of it.

But scrolls scroll, scroll back even further, because this didn't all happen in a vacuum. The sugar that made these families in Cuba, where there's quite a backstory more after the break, there's a saying in Cuba sina sukar no apayis without sugar.

There is no country that kind of In brief, sinasuka no ipi is encapsulates the whole essence and importance of sugar.

If you hopped in a bumper car and whizzed through Cuban history, you would knock into sugar constantly.

Sugar had very modest beginnings in Cuba. Before the eighteenth century. It was sort of artisanal level.

There was sugar, but it wasn't yet eaten or traded on a grand scale. But then boom, the British capture Havana in seventeen sixty two, just for seven months before it returns to Spanish hands. And as the world's demand for sugar increases, nearly the whole island changes its focus to one thing, sugar cane.

And it was like applying yeast to a solution of sugar. The whole thing suddenly.

Grew not far away. Haiti is a world leader in sugar production, but then enslaved workers there lead a successful revolution in the late seventeen hundreds, a huge gap in the market for sugar, so Cuba steps up.

In the space of one hundred years or so, Cuba became the largest sugar producer in the world, accounting for perhaps a quarter of the world market.

It had the right climate, hot perfect for sugarcane. Cuba became known as the sugar bowl of the world. And that's when this whole new class emerged, sugar crats. In fact, the very concept of Cuba as a nation came from these sugar crats.

They were the first people to call Cuba a country. The idea of calling the colony a country is interesting that it was Cuban sugar planters who were thinking of it in those terms.

So sugar was a driving force both politically and economically for Cuba, but also socially because the booming economy was built on the exploitation of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans.

Slavery played a huge role in Cuban history and society and helped determine what the eye and went on to become.

If an enslaved West African survived the harrowing ocean journey to Cuba, in all likelihood, they then had the misfortune of winding up cutting sugar cane.

Cutting sugar is backbreaking work, is ferocious.

Just a reminder if you've forgotten how difficult sugarcane cutting is, you'll.

Bent over double hacking away this very tough grass. Essentially with a sharp blade you can slice off your toe or your foot. It's very hot, there are snakes. Everything about it is backbreaking, punishing work.

Enslaved workers were likely to die within a decade of arriving on a Cuban sugarcane plantation.

It was inhumane and the conditions were awful.

The US abolished slavery in eighteen sixty five, but Cuba did the opposite. The use of enslaved people actually increased, largely to satisfy the hunger of the sugar industry.

Slavery persisted for a long time in.

Cuba until eighteen eighty six. In fact, according to some estimates, over the entire history of the Atlantic slave trade, Cuba received twice as many enslaved Africans as the US. Cuba a relatively small island country, only about seven hundred fifty miles long and one hundred miles wide, about the size of Tennessee if you're looking for a comparable state. That said, much of the sugar harvested by enslaved people was heading straight to America.

It was what joined Cuba economically at the hip to the United States, more than gambling, tourism anything like that. No Cuba and sugar the United States was fundamental.

Sugar just keeps popping up throughout Cuban history. The First War of Independence.

It's the first was led by plants in the east of the country, and they were sugar owners.

When that movement failed, there was a second attempt at independence from Spain and bump you see sugar again. As the rebel forces advanced, thousands of acres of sugarcane are set alight. A leader of the movement said the torch became the most devastating weapon in the insurrectionary arsenal. It was a protest, a way of disrupting the foundations of the country.

Historians generally reckoned that the Cubans were about to win, and then the US arrived.

This is in eighteen ninety eight.

And when the Spanish are finally booted out, it's an American flag that's raised over Havana instead of a Cuban.

One, with the smoldering sugarcane fields pouring smoke across the horizon. So as Cuba became supposedly independent, slavery had been abolished, but the sugar industry still remained, and working in the fields and mills continued to be unbelievably demanding work. On the flip side, if you were a Cuban sugar grower, the people who owned the farms, you were at the top of the social pyramid.

You could be well healthy. If you were a Cuban sugar planter, and many were, you certainly had social cachet.

So sugarcane defined the wealth of Cuba, fueled the importation of enslaved people, was part of the fight for independence, and was the economic glue that bound the island to the US.

It's fundamental. It's like saying, what is oil to Saudi Arabia? Now you get it without sugar.

There's no country without sugar. There is no country. So tell me about your impressions when you sat down for this interview. What was your first impression?

Well, Alfie was absolutely charming. He has incredible cool.

Marie Brenner who met Alfie and Pepe fun Whol when she was writing her article for Vanity Fair, So, yeah, Alfie has cool. Well, of course he has. He's a sugar.

They had grown up in what they call the country club section of Havana.

Going to society parties and polo matches. Alfi Junior had been raised to navigate social interactions with the fluidity of an orchestra conductor wielding his baton.

I expect they led quite a sort of frivolous and claustrophobic life. I would say it was an insular and inward looking social group with quite strict social mares and no little snobbery.

But don't forget when and where they grew up. Nineteen fifties Cuba. This was when the country was under the rule of General Battista. He was elected president in the early nineteen forties, and he took power again in the nineteen fifties after a military coup with financial and logistical support from the US, and again sugar appears as a

Bautista denies he as a dictator and says some of his opponents are pro communist.

Look if you feel the need to deny, you're a dictator.

With the sugar industry flourishing, apparently, contented workers also support Bautista, who sees power. In nineteen fifty.

Two, contented, I really wonder if the workers on the sugar farms might use a different word. The men who caught the sugar cane were still mostly black Cubans descendants of enslaved people. The less dangerous jobs in the sugar mills and factories those were largely done by white Cubans. As for the owners of the sugar farms, there were some hiccups that came along with operating a successful enterprise under a dictatorship I mean, sorry, alleged dictatorship. The fan

It was on this coast that exile Castro and a small band of rebels landed last December.

There were dozens of rebels on that rickety boat called the Grandma, including a young Argentinian named Chay Guevara. He also became a zealous leftist at university. While working as a doctor in Mexico City, he met Fidel Castro, and over the course of a conversation the first time they met, Guevara became convinced that the fight against Battista was his fight too.

I do remember when things started getting hot in Cuba in nineteen fifty six.

From the date of Castro's landing, Cuba was in a state of virtual civil war, with the revolutionaries trying to depose Battista, rid the country of US influence, and impose a new communist government.

This was the scene of tom oil in the capitol Havana. As the climax of revolution was reached, anyone suspected of sympathy for the Battista regime came in for a rough time.

They cut the electricity, they set off Molotov cocktails for.

The people of Cuba. The thunder of explosives became regular background noise.

Yes, yes, that's correct. My mother was sey La bon vitas.

The little bombs like the one that ripped through the Tropicana nightclub.

And at the time they didn't know what had happened. They just thought, oh, here's a bomb.

We just heard the blast.

You didn't know if there were more bombs in the place and if somebody was gonna come in with a machine gun or set fire to the place.

Riots broke out, people were kidnapped, hundreds were killed on both sides, while Battista suspended constitutional rights like freedom of expression and freedom of assembly.

This is already the beginning.

They last Bacon will be helping the capital to come.

Be sure, and just as Faulkner said, the past is never dead. It's not even passed. So like deja vu from the independence movement, the sugar fields went up and smoke, it.

Was actually teenagers and university students went after the rich people and they burned down the sugarcane fields.

Sugar represented so much of what people were fed up with, the inequity, the difference between their lives and those are the rich, including sugar farm owners.

Like the fun Holes, they were viewed as class a alta upper class. In developing countries, the upper class, if you're in the middle class or the lower class, is a very distant realm. It can seem very glamorous and something one would want to aspire to or overthrow.

From the Fidalista's point of view, people like the fun Holes were villains.

The problem is that some of them resented the manner in which they lived. They were there working at the fields and here's this guy in his huge mansion with his sorts, cars and his parties.

They were the parasite class. They were the leeches, they were the exploiters.

Many Cubans felt marginalized by the rich people like the fun Holes. Then there was the political corruption and the influence of the US in Cuba. All of it fueled the revolution. New Year's Eve nineteen fifty eight, brothers Alfie and Pepe vun Hul are at the Havana Yacht Club.

Obviously it's Godfather too. I mean it's like they're at their club. They're the fireworks.

People are there celebrating despite all the chaos at the time. But that night the clink of champagne glasses gets interrupted.

Batista's military turned on him, so he had to leave.

Rumors start swirling at the party. President Batista has been deposed. Castro and his revolutionaries have taken power.

Suddenly it's the shooting and people having to flee and run and run under cover, and run for the airport and run for boats, and everyone is fleeing.

Shortly afterward, armed militia arrive at the fun Hol's house. Alfi told Marie all about this for her Vanity Fair article.

When they got home, they discovered that there were Fidelistas in their house and that half the rooms had been cordon off, having been shot at by the Castro forces. His father was arrested.

Alfonso Senior is taken by the rebels and interrogated for hours.

Then the father had to have someone swear for him that he had never had anything to do with the Baptista government.

Finally he's released, but he isn't sticking around in Cuba.

The father was allowed to leave the country and he left Alfi in charge of the sugar interests.

Alfi had just graduated college from Fordham in New York. He's twenty one years old. And now responsible for holding on to the family sugar empire. At the peak of a revolution.

At last, doctor Fidel Castro himself arrived. Time and again he was held up by the crowds. He spoke to them of the new regime now being inaugurated, a regime, by the way, now formally recognized by Britain.

So Batista leaves the island is delighted. Castro drives in a slow convoy, roses a throne in front of his jeeps. My mother is in the crowd and rushes out and kisses the Melisium Fuegos, who is one of the heroes of the revolution. Everyone is delighted. The tyrant is gone.

Well, not everyone was delighted. For the rich, the landowners, things were unraveling and rapidly their assets were evaporating.

Fastra operates out of a nineteen story headquarters in Havana and covered up business industries in a wide, sweeping takeover of all means of production.

All the businesses, essentially a nationalized first the mills, then the smaller land holdings than big businesses, and then small businesses.

The revolution has taken over fifty one percent of the land through cast coos in the government owned canefield, the plantations, pasture land, and the guajiros. The workers who were promised for land find themselves captives of the stake.

Those people with the huge land holdings. And we're talking mainly the sugar industry because that was the number one industry in Cuba. The other one I think was tobacco. They were targeted and people lost their farms, and there were some that committed suicidles. They couldn't stand it that everything they've worked for all their life was now taken by the government.

That also includes Domatilla's Families Club, the Tropicana. It was take and by Castro's new government and nationalized. Now Castro took Marlon Brando's seat, and it's unclear what happened to the Tucan. Meanwhile, Alfie's there watching on as all the farms and businesses around him were being snapped up.

He was part of a culture that he was watching lose everything. You know, all over Havana, businesses were getting burned, there were riots in the street.

But Alfie's convinced while everyone was losing their businesses, they can keep their farms.

This will not happen to us, No one would dare trifle with us, and that was part of the grandiosity that they felt that their sugar holdings would protect them rather than make them a target.

Somehow, Marie says, Alfie believed he would be able to retain his land, even though he knew his life was on the line.

His life was in danger and he had to literally go from house to house because he would be shot at.

Alfi spent the year of nineteen fifty nine in hiding. Then came the evening that would be a cataclysm. Castro's rebels enter the family headquarters on the Avenida di Gomesmina, the street in Havana named after Alfie's grandfather.

When they broke into a boardroom.

The rebels slammed their guns on the conference table.

And the room, as he described it, was decorated with these astonishing maps of their one hundred and fifty thousand acres and the ten sugar mills, and Alfie said that they were trying to explain to us the process of what they were going to do and how they were going to take all of our property away. They circled a wall map and said this will be ours, all of it.

This experience with the rebels has become part of the Funhole's romantic origin story, a story that Alfie has told and retold many times. Here he and his brother Pepe are talking about it in that over the top video and again sorry.

After Castrocamen I was there when basically they told us that I want to take our properties away, and it was a really pround plus and experience.

When we think it was traumatic for us, it was, But I think how brave my grandparents were and parents were and what a what a must have been for them have been devastated.

Their mills were seized, the historic family mansion we talked about was taken. In fact today it's now the country's decorative arts museum. It was because I mean increasingly clear that Alfi von Hul had to leave Cuba.

Literally he ran for his life. He went to his house. They had ten thousand dollars in a safe. He made the decision to leave the money there because he was terrified what would happen to him if he was caught taking that much cash out of Havana.

His brother Pepe raced out of Cuba two.

And he got on a plane and on the plane was Errol Flynn fleeing Havana to a detail which I just loved.

When the Tropicana was nationalized, Domatila also fled the country by plane.

I left using a fake passport.

And John Paul's mother slipped out around this time.

My mother's family, like many Cubans who had businesses, then left the island. There was no livelihood for them to pursue.

In nineteen fifty nine, twenty three year old Alfie touchdown in Miami.

His life as a young man in his twenties was a reversal of fortune, coming into a country that he knew, of course, because he'd gone to college here. And yes, they were very lucky because they had a lot more money in America than a lot of other Cuban refugees did. But still the mansions were gone, the assets were gone.

So Alfi has just arrived in Florida. He's been able to get some of their money out of Cuba, and along with his newly exiled status, Alfie receives a directive from the family patriarch. Didn't his grandfather explicitly tell him that he had a responsibility to build it back up.

Yes, he was told this money is not going to last past your generation. And if you want to have money for your heirs, you're going to have to build up everything again.

The fan Holes set their sights on one thing.

They had to make their fortune.

But how how did the fun Holes become some of the wealthiest sugar growers in the United States? And how have you, even if you don't eat sugar, helped them to become billionaires. Next time, I pay the fun Hools a house visit. Yeah, so we're looking at Alfie's house and it's huge. I mean, it looks like a hotel. And get to the bottom of how they ended up as the most infamous sugar barons in America.

They live in Palm Beach.

They lived the lives of multi millionaires, and that is strictly due to the onwitting generosity of federal taxpayers.

And they begin to bring in Jamaicans, thousands and thousands of Jamaicans to cut the cane.

It's good for them, it's not good for cause we would have wanted to fucking bottom. We would have wanted this struggling to keep their parks.

Say that's next time on Big Sugar. Big Sugar is produced by Imagine Audio Weekday fund Productions and novel for iHeartMedia. The series is hosted by me Celeste Hedley. Big Sugar is produced by Jeff Eisenman at Weekday Fund Productions. It's executive produced by Kara Welker, Nathan Kloke, and Marie Brenner. Story editor and executive producer is Joe Wheeler. The researcher is Nadia Metti. Production management from Scherie Houston, Frankie Taylor