The Cruel War on Innocent Cubans

Did Maria Isabel Fernandez Have to Die This Week?

Updated: Sunday, September 29th

About two old buildings like this collapse each month in Cuba. Yes, they are homes to families.

        This week the building housing several families in the Vibora suburb of Havana collapsed, bringing four stories crashing down. Some escaped but 50-year-old Maria Isabel Fernandez was buried under the rubble. Family members and rescue teams frantically searched for her for the next 24 hours, but to no avail. Maria this week became the latest victim of a Perfect Storm on the island -- namely, the combination of a lack of funds, a series of devastating hurricanes that weakened already weak structures, and, of course, the cruelest cut of all -- the U. S. embargo against Cuba that has been in effect since 1962 to appease two generations of the richest and most powerful Cuban-exile anti-Castro zealots. While conveniently proselytized American citizens and the conveniently propagandized American media are not supposed to care abut Maria Isabel Fernandez, there are many others who do care.

Sara Rainsford {left} cares when Cubans like Maria Isabel Fernandez die in Cuba. But Sara is British. And she is the BBC's brilliant journalist in Cuba. In her regular informative insights from Cuba about the lives of everyday Cubans, Sara is neither proselytized nor propagandized. Therefore Sara is free to publish the  truth and she is keen enough to recognize the truth when she sees it. Sara this week encapsulated the death of Maria Isabel Fernandez, how she died and why she died. After six decades of sublime ignorance, cowardice, and heartlessness, it is perhaps time that Americans embraced such hows and whys. As she told about the death of Maria Isabel Fernandez this week, Sara Rainsford included this sentence about the collapsed building: "Inside Malecon 161, on Havana's sun-soaked seafront, you have to pick your way through wooden props supporting the ceiling to reach the empty space where several apartments used to be." The BBC's Sara Rainsford can write such a sentence, and tell such a story. It is a shame for the U. S. democracy that American reporters cannot and will not do the same. In that cowardly, heartless manner, Americans have been intentionally misinformed for six decades about a nearby island that is very much ingrained in the history and fabric of the U. S. democracy.

        In 1962 the United States imposed an embargo on Cuba. Declassified U. S. documents reveal that the purpose of the embargo was to starve and deprive the Cuban people on the vulnerable island to induce them to overthrow Fidel Castro and the Revolutionary Government. This U. S. policy was instituted in 1962 after the U. S. government, Cuban exiles, and the Mafia had failed in repeated attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and had also failed in one brazen military attack, at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, to overthrow the revolutionary rule in Cuba. In fact, most non-proselytized and non-propagandized observers, like Sara Rainsford, believe that the cowardice, greed, and stupidity of such tactics constitute a prime reason that, at age 87, Fidel Castro is still alive and so is the Cuban Revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed Batista-Mafia dictatorship way back on January 1, 1959! The Batista-Mafia rule didn't end because it was loved.

          The Batista-Mafia dictatorship in Cuba as well as such things as the U. S. embargo of Cuba and the terrorist bombing of Cubana Flight 455 have been sanitized in the U. S. by such distorted misconceptions as, "Batista and the Mafia treated the Cubans like Mother Teresa would have treated them" and "There were no innocents on that airplane." But Fulgencio Batista and Meyer Lansky were not clones of Mother Teresa; and there were 73 innocent souls, including many children, on Cubana Flight 455. Such distortions relate to the fact that the Cuban Revolution was the first to overthrow a U.S.-backed dictatorship and, even more significantly, the leaders and riches of that overthrown dictatorship quickly -- and permanently, it seems -- reconstituted themselves on American soil, namely nearby Miami, Union City, and then Washington.

        For sure, Cuba's revolutionary government has made more than its share of mistakes since 1959 -- some colossal mistakes, in fact. But there are two reasons, against all odds, it has survived for all these decades: #1: The majority of Cubans on the island love sovereignty and tired long ago of foreign domination; and #2: the majority of Cubans on the island remember when the U. S. democracy shamefully installed-and/or-supported brutal, thieving dictators like Batista, Trujillo, Samosa, Pinochet, etc., throughout the Caribbean and Latin America -- even overthrowing democratically elected governments to install U.S.-friendly dictators in countries like El Salvador, Chile, etc. For Americans, especially self-proclaimed patriots, to ignore those historic facts is a disgrace to democracy, and to Cubans like Maria.

     Since the 1960s a handful of two generations of rich and powerful Cuban exiles have aligned with enough rich and powerful U. S. politicians to enact stringent laws that mutually benefit them but harm everyone else -- including Maria Isabel Fernandez, who died so needlessly this week in Havana!

The history of Florida is rather well know, except since 1959 its True History has been distorted.

To not know the sugar monopoly in the U. S. is to not know the post-1959 history of the U. S. or Florida.

      From South Florida to the incredibly luxurious Casa de Campo resort on the Dominican Republic's southeast shores lies the world's greatest sugar monopoly and one of the world's greatest fortunes. It is controlled by the multi-billion-dollar Fanjul family. In an article that originated in England's The Week magazine and is still Online at theweek.co.uk entitled "Alfy Fanjul, the Sugar Daddy," Charles Lawrence writes: "Alfonso 'Alfy" Fanjul Jr. is the 'Big Sugar,' the patriarch of the Cuban family which dominates the huge sugar industry of Florida. His is the fifth generation of a family which owned the lion's share of the Cuban sugar industry, slave plantations and all, before Fidel Castro's revolution seized their land, smoke-stack refineries, and Havana palaces in 1959. The Fanjuls sailed to Florida with cash, jewels and a few paintings, and went back to business. Fifty years later, his profit protected by a federal regulation that pegs the price of sugar at a minimum 18 cents a pound in the U. S. compared to between six and 12 cents elsewhere in the world, Fanjul is poised to complete his conquest of Florida's sugar country. His company, Flo-Sun Inc., is about to buy up the last 187,000 acres of sugar cane it does not already own in the state, and a nice new refinery that comes with them. That is what is left of Flo-Sun's last commerical rival, US Sugar. But the really neat trick is that Fanjul and his family are buying it not at the market rate from US Sugar but on the cheap from the Florida state government. How did the Fanjuls persuade the state of Florida to hand over 187,000 acres of sugar cane? First, the Fanjuls are good pals with the Bush family. When George W. Bush ran for President in 2000, the Fanjuls made maximum contributions to the campaign; when George W.'s brother Jeb, Florida's governor, called for the recount that took the White House from Democrat Al Gore and gave it to Bush, Fanjul's lawyer Joseph 'Pit Bull' Klock was the man who defended the recount against legal challenges. In the 1990s, a series of prosecutions stopped the Fanjuls' age-old tradition of cutting costs by shipping in workers from the Caribbean, keeping them in barracks behind locked gates, and charging them for food while paying below-minimum as they harvested with machetes. But it didn't stop Fanjul making friends with the men in power. When he faced a government plan to end a lucrative tax break in February, 1996, he knew what to do; he telephoned President Bill Clinton to vociferously complain. No one would ever have been the wiser if it had not been for the fact that Fanjul's lobbying call to Clinton -- as made public by Kenneth Starr's famous impeachment report -- distracted President Clinton from a blow-job being bestowed by a soon-to-be-famous intern named Monica Lewinsky."

        On August 6, 2001, the print edition of U.S. News & World Report featured an article written by Marci McDonald entitled: "A Sweet Deal for Big Sugar's Daddies: Palm Beach's Fanjul Brothers Devour Domino." The article is still readily available at usnews.com. It states: "Alfonso -- or, as he prefers to call himself, Alfy -- Fanjul was on the line, wanting to talk about the sugar business. This, in itself, was nothing unusual. In his most famous call on the subject, the Palm Beach, Fla., sugar billionaire was on the phone with Bill Clinton one afternoon in February 1996, trying to persuade the then president not to support a sugar tax. It was two years later -- when Fanjul saw Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's report -- before he discovered that while he was trying to bend the president's ear, Monica Lewinsky was in the Oval Office trying to get Clinton's attention in other ways. 'I heard no heavy breathing or nothing,' Fanjul recalled last week. 'I was really handling my own business, and I didn't know anything else was going on.' The subsidy scheme has clearly sweetened the Fanjuls' sumptuous lifestyle. Since their 1959 flight from Cuba, where their family ruled the sugar industry -- entertaining the Duke of Winsor and Hollywood's royalty -- they have toiled to reclaim their lost glory. Their secretive web of global holdings now includes 180,000 acres of sugar cane in Florida and 240,000 more in the Dominican Republic. Still, the Cuban Revolution taught them not to leave their political fate to chance. During the last election cycle, the sugar industry contributed $3.3 million to candidates in both parties -- about a third of that from the Fanguls' own larder." The Fanjul sugar monopoly in Batista's Cuba was worth many millions; the Fanjul sugar monopoly in the U. S. and the Dominican Republic is clearly worth many billions. In a weird twist of fate, Fidel Castro's overthrow of Batista has ended up incredibly enriching many unlikely benefactors who obviously didn't realize in the fog of the 1950s that the U. S. democracy, like Batista's Cuba, could be purchased with deftly honed kickback money secreted to elected leaders!

The Fanjul sugar empire dates back to the early 20th century in Cuba.

  But Alfy and Pepe Fanjul became billionaires in Florida after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.

The Miami Herald's columnist Carl Hiaasen parodied the Fanjol brothers in his book "Strip Tease."

Hiaasen depicted two brothers as sugar barons who, among other things, imported cheap labor.

Powerful Republicans have long had cozy relations with powerful Cuban exiles. 

But so have powerful Democrats! And in a two-party system, it is democracy that suffers.
And that is especially true when voters do not hold the culprits accountable.

      Fanjul's sugar monopoly -- transferred by the Cuban Revolution from Batista's Cuba to Florida and the Dominican Republic -- reveals a flaw in America's democracy: It's a two-party system -- Republican and Democratic -- and if both parties are for sale, then the system has a problem. Neither the George W. Bush presidency, the Jeb Bush governorship, nor the Bill Clinton presidency -- all two-term affairs -- represented a problem for the incredibly rich Fanjul family. Jose Lambert, a top reporter on the Palm Beach political scene, wrote an article, which you can easily find Online, for Forbes Magazine entitled "Palm Beach Sugar Barons Accused in Wikileaks Cables of trying to Sabotage U. S. Trade Deal." It began with these words: "Palm Beach sugar barons Pepe and Alfy Fanjul, who lavish both the Republican and Democratic parties with millions in contributions, were accused of trying to sabotage U. S. foreign policy and corrupting foreign politicians in diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks. While the U. S. government has spent millions in farm subsidies on the Fanjuls, the Cuban expats allegedly tried to torpedo the CAFCA free-trade agreement in the mid-2000s because it was expected to threaten their bottom line. The story came to light this week in a Palm Beach Post investigation into the Fanjuls businesses. The brothers grow sugar canes on 12 percent of Palm Beach County's entire land mass. The sugar is sold under the names Florida Crystals and Domino."

   In an article entitled "Who Are the Top 100 Richest Hispanics in the U. S.," wiki.answers.com begins, of course, with the Fanjuls and a conservative estimate of $30 billion. The article says, "The two oldest Fanjul brothers, Alfonso and Jose -- known as Alfie and Pepe -- with their wives, Tina and Emilia, embody a Latin-style elegance and panache reminiscent of the high-flying days of Old Havana." While it is politically and socially correct in the U. S. to say that the Cuban-exile millionaires and billionaires "fled Castro's Cuba pennyless," the fact is that many, many millions or billions of dollars left Cuba during the Batista-Mafia dictatorship for banks in Switzerland, New York, South Florida, and Union City, New Jersey. Or to quote wiki.answers.com: "When the Fanjul family fled from Fidel Castro's revolution in 1959, they arrived first in New York with a strong sense of family, a hefty financial portfolio and a perfect pedigree as one of Cuba's largest and wealthiest sugar plantation families. All that was missing were the sugar fields." Well, soon the Fanjuls owned 400,000 acres of land in Florida and the Dominican Republic. The Fanjul jet in the above photo, according to wiki.answers.com, flies guests to parties in South Florida and the Dominican Republic's Casa de Campo.

Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia, for example, relishes {above} his invitations from the Fanjuls.

        Meanwhile, in Havana this week a beloved lady, Maria Isabel Fernandez, died beneath the unyielding rubble when the entire interior of a decaying old four-story building that she called home collapsed from the top level to the bottom level. In other words, the Americans who have allowed the cruel embargo against Cuba to be in effect since 1962 can be proud that, while the embargo has not induced the Cuban people to overthrow their revolutionary government or to kill Fidel Castro, it indeed has succeeded in starving, depriving, and killing a lot of innocent Cubans. Maria Isabel Fernandez is merely the latest.

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