Amy Serrano, the young filmmaker of the independent documentary, "Sugar Babies", has a pretty good idea by now of the power of the sugar barons including Florida's Fanjul family who own Florida Crystals as well as large scale holdings in the Dominican Republic. With little advertising, "Sugar Babies" showed at the UM Cosford Cinema earlier this week to a full house. The filmmaker took questions after the screening.
Serrano documents the virtual enslavement and terrible working conditions of desperately poor Haitians rounded up in their country and transported to work in DR sugar farms across the border; all to provide cheap labor for sugar billionaires including the Fanjuls. In thousands of cases, workers in the DR now comprise the stateless poor, including children of Haitian parents denied citizenship although they were born in the Dominican Republic.
This filmmaker's effort-- producer, director, editor, and camera rolled into one-- gained access to sugar farms like La Romana owned by the Fanjuls through the agency of priests of the Catholic Church. At least one was reassigned as a consequence of this film. Serrano told the audience, during the question and answer part of the program, that she was constantly worried by the presence of Fanjul security forces, hovering in the background in Japanese pickup trucks with dark tinted windows.
My comment to Serrano thanked her for her courage and asked about the circumstances surrounding the cancellation of "Sugar Babies" by festival management during the 2008 Miami International Film Festival. It is a subject I've blogged before, and although it has never been proven, certainly the result of influence by the sugar billionaires. Festival organizers concocted a reason to pull the film, but the real reason is buried about 4/5ths of the way through the documentary, when the lens turns on the Fanjuls of Miami and West Palm Beach.
"Sugar Babies" whips by the lush and wealthy surroundings of Casa de Campo, the Fanjul owned resort, at the beginning of the film, showing the vast wealth through a series of montages without explaining that the legacy of 17th century slave trade with European nations and the newly discovered Americas still casts a long shadow of savage income disparity and living conditions in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Toward the end of the film there is one scene that tells the whole story: a glitzy fund raising event in Palm Beach with all the pearls and diamonds and cleavage for a medical clinic in the Dominican Republic. What is abundantly clear in the context of the previous hour and forty minutes is that Haitian workers on the Fanjul properties in the Dominican Republic have "nothing, nothing, nothing." No access to health care, to food, or the right of citizenship required by the United Nations.
Serrano told the audience that she asked for, and was denied an opportunity for an interview with the Fanjuls by Gaston Cantens, former Miami state legislator and now spokesman for the family business interests. But she ventured that she was really not sure what she would be able to say; knowing how wealthy they are and that their wealth is built on the backs of so much misery.
In Palm Beach, the Fanjuls expect the Palm Beach County Commission to approve in mid-December a plan for an "inland port" to comprise thousands of acres in the middle of the historic Everglades. The state of Florida has already recommended against the plan, but it doesn't cost much to influence the vote of the county commission. Palm Beach County Commissioners would do well to screen "Sugar Babies", to fill out their understanding of the forces at work in Florida and in the Everglades... not to mention Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
This isn't a perfect documentary, but it is a bigger story than the film itself. I am not sure what the young people in the audience took away from this film. They seemed dumb-founded at what they had experienced. In fact, young Americans are taking away from our manifold and historic crises that there is not much that they or anyone can do to change the world. This filmmaker's brave journey should have been highlighted for the public in one or another of the region's mainstream newspapers or television, if only to amplify that the only thing that can change the world is people. That this message hasn't been incorporated in news about "Sugar Babies" tarnishes our own liberties. (Read more, in our archive under "Big Sugar")
1 comment:
My uncle was the guy who yelled "Cut off his head."
The UM students were so clueless, they were actually cheering when they saw the silicone breasts at the Fanjul's party.
The people I was sitting around were actually rooting for the bad guys. It was sad.
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