It's not possible. He's the one who makes you do it. Sugar has conquered the world. No revolution, no end to slavery, no war and no crisis has been able to halt its relentless march. At the start of the 20th century, the sugar industry grew even more powerful as a new player sees control of the market, the United States. American imperialism and American sugar policy went hand in hand. New markets, new products and exorbitant profits, more than ever, sugar has the world in its grip. The industry knows no limits. Sugar, a bitter sweet pleasure.
If the history of sugar is associated with changes in the European diet through the 18th and 19th century, by the 20th century, the pioneer for a long of those changes is definitely the United States. There's actually began in the late 19th century. More and more people moved to cities. Food had to be supplied more efficiently. People could no longer grow their own food. They had to buy it. Manufacture receives the opportunity and began producing processed non-perishable foods. And so that food revolution really served the function of putting sugar everywhere in all sorts of consumables that we buy off the shelf.
Sugar keeps food from spoiling. Sugar slips into our diet in all sorts of pernicious ways. And I think that with the arrival of sort of mass-produced branded foods, maybe people become even less conscious of how much sugar they're eating. Since the late 19th century, the US has been exporting a steady stream of new products across the globe. Fast food, ice cream and soft drinks. It's the golden age of sugar. Around 1900, soft drinks became popular. When people sat down to tea or coffee, they ate sweets, cakes and chocolates, which were now produced in large quantities on assembly lines.
By then, sweets had reached the middle class. At first, they were consumed only on Sundays, but soon they became part of everyday life. Sugar was unstoppable. In 1800, people in England consumed an average of almost 9 kilos of sugar per year. A little more than a century later, consumption in the US had risen to around 30 kilos per person. During the same period, the world's population nearly doubled, while the US population increased more than 12 fold. Demand exploded and the food industry craved sugar more than ever.
It's really important to us to emphasize this plantation kept operating until 1973. Most people don't know that people continued to live on plantations for that long. When slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, after the Civil War, sugar farmers in Louisiana feared for their income. But like the French and English plantation owners in the Caribbean, in Mauritius and Henri-Union, they adapted to the new conditions. Before long, the sugar industry was flourishing once again along the banks of the Mississippi.
These were businesses that didn't just stop just because slavery ended. The people who ran these businesses were still interested in making money. In a lot of ways, the interest was not in figuring out how to restructure society after the Civil War. It was instead how do we continue to do the thing we did before but without slavery? So they just replaced slavery with wage labor. These photos were taken years after the Civil War and the end of slavery. The workers and their families shown here were supposedly free.
The government had promised them 40 acres and a mule, land that could help provide economic independence. But large sugar cane plantations remained intact and the promises of land were never kept. To survive, freed people took up their machetes once more and returned to work for their former masters. The planter power was so complete. There was a major strike here. The response from the planters from that event was to create essentially their own militias.
In 1887, when the Knights of Labor organized about 10,000 workers around Tibido, the planters, the planters association, was intimately involved in the suppression of that strike which was brutally violent. On November 23rd, 1887, an estimated 60 striking black sugar workers and protesters were shot and killed by police and militia in Tibidou, Louisiana. In a letter, a landowner's widow welcomed the massacre, saying it should settle the question of who is to rule, white or blacks for the next 50 years.
In Louisiana and across the south, plantation owners used their economic and local influence to uphold racial segregation and sustain white supremacy, while tolerating violence as a tool of racial control. Meanwhile, on the plantations, work conditions remained largely unchanged. What mattered most was that sugar cane continued to grow, refineries continued to operate and business boomed. At the turn of the century, the heart of America's sugar empire lay on the east coast.
And it had a face. Henry Osborne Havemeier. He helped shape American sugar imperialism. Havemeier emerged as the first modern sugar baron, comparable to Rockefeller in the oil industry. Within a few years, he controlled most US sugar refineries and built the American sugar refining company. By the early 20th century, it dominated the industry, processing 98% of America's sugar. It was one of the most powerful economic conglomerates in the US. On the other, it dictated the selling price of refined sugar and kept it high to increase profits. And it worked very well. The US government tried successfully to break the cartel. Sugar was unstoppable.
1898 was the year of conquests. In April, the United States declared war on Spain. At the beginning of the 19th century, Spain lost most of its empire and its status as a world power. But it still controlled three island territories, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Cuba was the richest colony, not only within the Spanish empire, but among colonial territories worldwide. It was also the world's largest producer of sugar, though it's Cuba. Most of the sugar produced in Cuba flew into the US. After the US defeated Spain in 1898, American interests rushed in. Havemeier seized the opportunity to expand his investments in Cuba, soon gaining control of several refineries on the island.
Sugar is a central element in the relationship between the US and Cuba. Spain's defeat marked the collapse of its remaining colonial empire in the Americas and the Pacific. The US occupied the Philippines and annexed Puerto Rico. Cuba gained independence but remained under US military administration. The US and the US fought for the United States. Cuba played a long, supplying the United States and the American food industry with vast quantities of raw sugar. Plantations were modernized to meet this growing demand, but this did little to improve working conditions.
In Cuba, the sugar economy created a new social order. On one side stood former slaves turned wage labourers, Chinese contract workers, impoverished migrants from Europe, and seasonal workers from Haiti and Jamaica, all hoping to find work on sugar plantations, opposite them to the sugar aristocracy, Creole and Spanish planter families who owned vast estates known as centrals, and maintained close ties to political power and to the United States. While poverty and hunger gripped the countryside, Cuban elites gathered in the clubs and casinos of Habana. The island was split into two worlds, the sugar plantations and high society, and the gap between them kept widening.
In Eastern Cuba, many farmers lost their land as large sugar plantations expanded during the night. In the 2010s and 1920s, there were periodic local protests and armed resistance against plantation conditions. It was no accident that Fidel Castro's guerrilla war began in this part of Cuba. Precision that to deal from Cuba is for owner. The son of a large landowner, the young lawyer represented expropriated farmers and victims of the sugar industry.
In the 1950s, Fidel Castro led the armed struggle against the dictatorship of General Batista. On January 1st 1959, his rebel army entered Habana, the revolution claimed victory. The Guajiros, sugarcane cutters with their machetes, were now celebrated as heroes. The American sugar factories were soon nationalized, plantations were collectivized, and the land was distributed. Large landowners fled, but Cuba's sugar story was far from over. And there was nothing we would cut the cane. There was a lot of cane and we had to cut it. The imperialists were afraid of it. Well, we didn't. Because we will cut it to the last one.
The US trade embargo cut off the American market, but it was soon replaced by the vast Soviet market. Cuba's leadership doubled down on sugar, setting ever more ambitious quotas. In 1970, the target was 10 million tons. Students arrived from all corners of the world to cut sugarcane. Among them, some Castro supporters from the United States. Sugar was the fuel of the revolution until the source began to dry up. In Tyre Force, land was cleared to make room for sugarcane cultivation. Cultivar caña de azúcar, which is a caña de azúcar that gradually depleted the soil of its nutrients.
Soil erosion followed, and after 40 or 50 years, much of the land was barely productive. As a result, many sugar mills were abandoned or moved to other locations. Today, Cuba produces very little sugar and is forced to import it. A society that once generated great wealth through the production and export of sugar now depends on sugar brought in from abroad. Sugar was the backbone of the Cuban economy, but depleted soils and the collapse of the Soviet Union broke it. How can a country free itself from a commodity for which it was once conquered, colonized, and exploited? And what comes after sugar? Caribbean countries are still wrestling with this question.
In the 1960s, the British sugar colonies gained independence but remained part of the Commonwealth. France kept its Caribbean islands as overseas territories. But across the region, in Jamaica, Martenique, Trinidad, Guadeloupe and French Guiana, little changed. The best lands still belong to white plantation owners, Bequez, as they are known in Martenique. My family was here, there was a big problem. I know them all day, but I know them all day. I know them all day, I know how they manipulated them.
Sugarcane was now cut by black agricultural workers, the descendants of enslaved Africans. The emancipated slaves did not receive compensation in the way the slaveholders did, for the labor, generations and generations of labor that their ancestors had performed. And they were not able to invest that money in their own futures. And so you find generations of poverty succeeding generations of enslavement. Disadvantaged is inherited as well as wealth. Disadvantaged accumulates just as well as capital.
The legacy of sugar weighs heavily, on the people and on the depleted soil sacrificed to sugarcane monoculture at the expense of other crops and essential infrastructure. The islands lived largely from sugar, a dangerous addiction. Not that sugar consumption declined quite the opposite. But by the 1960s Caribbean cane sugar was no longer essential to Europe. France and Britain turned to modern intensive agriculture.
Sugar beet cultivation became fully industrialized. So why import sugar from across the world when it can be produced at home? And interestingly, the first major European agriculture lobby came from beet farmers and the beet sugar industry. This shift was accelerated by Europe's common agricultural policy, which subsidized producers and above all, guaranteed a minimum price for sugar beets. But the guarantee price, which is done in general, meant that the overproduction of price guarantees were set so high that they encouraged overproduction, surplus sugar, then flooded the world market.
As a result, sugar prices on the world market fell steadily in the 1950s and 1960s. So low that producers, especially in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean, could barely survive. This harmful price dumping was the result of protectionism and collusion between European governments and large industrial companies. The price was reduced by the cost of the country. Undercut by subsidized European beet sugar, Caribbean cane sugar lost its place on the world market.
From Jamaica to Martinique, owners shuttered plantations and factories. Well, when the sugar economy collapses, these Caribbean economies cast about looking for other ways to make their national income. So they're still oriented toward growing agricultural products for exports. So bananas became a crop that a lot of people grow. They're still oriented toward catering to Europeans and others. So tourism becomes a way that they try to prosper nationally. Now, none of these things really replaces the profitability of sugar.
This month, is it the last time you've worked? It's the last time I've worked with you. Three days you've worked. And you think you've been working for two months? No, it's not. It's not. It's not. But everyone, it's not only the world but also the same. Unemployment rose, hitting young people the hardest, many emigrated. Once again, sugar drove people into exile this time from the islands to Europe.
In France, they became known as the Bumidom generation, named after the government agency founded in 1963 to bring young people from overseas areas, primarily Martinique, Guadeloupe and Réunion to France. They supplied cheap labor for the post-war economic boom. In the UK, their counterparts were the Windrush generation, who traveled from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and St. Kitts and Nevis, to work on construction sites in London, Birmingham and Manchester.
They were workers Britain desperately needed until the economic crisis of the late 1970s took away the jobs they were brought in for. Because jobs remained scarce back at home, many saw work on the sugar cane fields as their only option. And so thousands of Jamaicans turned to Florida, the new land of sugar and opportunity. The men lined up to representatives either from the companies or from the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association. And these fellows want to see their hands, they'll feel them to see if they have calluses. They ask you the questions, you know, you will in a work, what kind of work you do and you tell them farm work bosses. You will in a work seven days a week, yes boss, you will in a year price and for all that.
I get this video and I start looking at it and I see these guys with their hands out, I see them bending, I see them, you know, feeling muscles and I think, man it's exactly. In 1989, David Gorman and two other attorneys filed a lawsuit against Florida's largest sugar producers. They sued on behalf of 20,000 Jamaican sugar cane cutters. Migrant workers paid peace work wages far below the US minimum wage, the case we drag on for years. When I watch it, I feel that we got screwed, they got screwed, we got screwed. We should have won. The Jamaican workers were employed under the temporary H2 visa program. The sugar industry made extensive use of this program well into the 1990s.
I am an H2 worker coming from the island of Jomieta. I am an H2 worker cutting key in a Florida. Working so hard in the burning sun, wondering if slavery really don't work in, working, working on your key and feed still. You turn on another road and you turn another road and there is this barrack in the middle of nowhere holding 3,000 men. And the music, water dripping from the ceiling, the proximity of the men sleeping next to one another. It was in my early 20s at the time and it was the closest I had ever seen in my life of something akin to slavery. Some time they put the king price at the $120.00. The next needed drop it at the $105.00 and such a life.
They keep on. So every time they see you cutting the king fast, every time you make up quick money, they drop the price low and low. The next day. It's a crime. They contractually agreed to come and work for a certain amount of money. They were not paid that. They were not provided the housing that they contractually agreed to. They weren't provided the medical care. They were not provided anything that was promised to them and yet they provided what was requested of them for the sugar industry. The vast plantations are still owned by the same corporation today, Florida crystals.
At its helm are two brothers originally from Cuba, Alfonso Fangul, Nunes Alfie and Jose Fangul, Nunes Pepe. People ask me, what do you do? What are your professions? I say former. And sometimes I look at me, former. So I am. I've done everything in a form. It's an American success story. Two self-made men who had fled Cuba in 1959 to escape communism and went on to become billionaires. The sons of a Cuban sugar manufacturer built a vast sugar empire. First, Florida crystals, then the world's largest refined sugar company, American Sugar Refining, known as ASR.
The name traces back to the company of America's sugar baron, Henry Osborne Havomir. They saw a bottom large part of the old Havomir Trust. Today it is the largest sugar refinery conglomerates in the world, and a leader in sugar production and marketing. A true success story. Subsidized by the US government. The sugar industry has an arrangement under US law that is more favorable than any other agricultural industry. They have a program that is just every other agricultural commodity will kill for after the Cuban revolution in 1961.
The US wanted to become independent of reliance on foreign sugar. So to increase US sugar production, they didn't put on a tariff per se. What they did was they put in a guarantee. In other words, if you grow sugar in the United States, we'll agree on a price. The government will set a price. And if you cannot sell your sugar at that price, the US government will buy it from you. And it's a price that guarantees a profit every year. You will never lose money on sugar. Like Europe, the United States protects its sugar producers and its market.
And since the 1960s, the fanhole brothers have worked to ensure it remains that way. The fanholes were very smart politically. They made the very smart political decision that one would be a major contributor to the Democratic Party, the other would be a contributor to the Republicans. So did the funhool's strategy pay off? In 1992, a judge ruled in favor of the workers. The sugar barons were ordered to pay $51 million in unpaid wages and compensation. You know, we used to joke around about being able to go down to Jamaica and hand out money. And they took an appeal.
And the Appellate Court reversed. They decided that the contract was ambiguous. I've done this work for 45 years. I've done more farm-worker cases than any attorney in the country. I've won more farm-worker cases than anyone in the country. And this is the one that got away. They didn't want to pay the money and they were willing to pay their lawyers. And their lawyers gambled and won, essentially. Their victory was comprehensive.
After the trial, the fanholes quickly replaced sugar cane workers on their Florida plantations with harvesting machines, luring costs, and eliminating workers altogether. And their empire has continued to expand. Since 1984, the funhool brothers have also operated plantations and refineries in the Dominican Republic, just a two-hour flight from Miami. Central Romana, the country's largest sugar producer, is largely controlled by the fan-hole family and forms part of their broader corporate empire.
Here, Haitian migrant workers paid by the cut are still cheaper than machines. Like Florida crystals and dominoes sugar, central Romana is part of the funhool brothers empire in the US. This empire was built in the province of El Sabo by taking land from small farmers. Like this public land, where displaced families now live in makeshift chats on the edge of a central Romana plantation. At 3 o'clock in the morning on January 26th, 2016, private security forces employed by central Romana arrived and destroyed more than 80 homes.
The farmers were unable to present formal documents, the land belonged to the community. When the company took it, the dignity of many people was violated. Dominican families lost their homes. States visited Central Scholaris and the owners, using American patriots as they were given the Purges to allow to store books and parties for them, when daring to act against it. Central Romana is the real power here, standing above everyone, including the president. When we met with a provincial governor, he told us there was nothing he could do.
If he tried, he said he'd be removed from office within minutes. In 2022, a US government investigation confirmed the allegations against Central Romana in the Dominican Republic. An import ban was imposed on the company, a ban the funhole swiftly contested. In March 2025, the ban was lifted shortly after Donald Trump's re-election. Pepe Fanhole is one of his largest donors. Over the past centuries, the number of sugar plantations and overall sugar production expanded dramatically.
Today, just seven or eight major companies dominate the industry and maintain close ties with governments. In Europe, these include Zudzucker, Germany, Tariots and France, potato, Laila, England and the fanholes in Florida. And then there's Kossan and Ryzen in Brazil. Sugarcane has been grown there since the 16th century. Today, Brazil is the world's largest sugar producer and exporter.
The international oil crisis made Brazil aware of how dependent it was on fossil fuels. In response, the country decided to subsidize the production of ethanol. When oil prices soared in 1973, Brazilians turned to a resource they had at home. In 1975, the National Pro-Aulcall Program was launched, promoting the production of bioethanol from sugarcane. Ever since, Brazil has relied on biofuel as an alternative to fossil fuels.
So, could sugar help save the planet and humanity? An energy transition is taking shape in São Paulo, Brazil's richest state, and a stronghold of industrial agriculture. 14% of the world's sugar is produced here. 6 million hectares are under cultivation. Half of the area is dedicated to making bioethanol. This soil is becoming compacted. As in Florida, harvesting is now done entirely by machine. The environmental pollution caused by burning ethanol is much lower than that caused by gasoline or diesel.
The air may be cleaner, but this calculation must also include soil degradation, the exploitation of workers, deforestation, river pollution, and the death of plants and animals. And then there are the effects of drought made worse by deforestation and vast monocultures. In 2024, fire sparked by negligence in Arson, tore through tens of thousands of hectares of plantation land in the state of São Paulo, shrouding nearly half of Brazil in smoke. And yet, markets barely flinched.
The outlook remained optimistic. Growth, it seemed, would continue. The sugar industry knows no limits. It seeks to destroy and annihilate everything around it. For around 500 years, people and land across every continent have been exploited to sweeten our lives. Sugar has left a heavy legacy behind, racism, overconsumption, and a reckless approach to nature. And Okan Airfn is from Bruxi Clos Omhan with Natura. Slavery, displacement, forced labor and environmental destruction. It's the bitter price of our collective addiction to sugar. cant by 18,235. EARREN.