C&H Sugar is owned by the American Sugar Refining Group, a $4 billion company and the world’s largest refiner of cane sugar. It was founded by Alfonso and José Fanjul, brothers who fled Cuba in 1959 after the revolution.
The richest 1.5% of landowners in Cuba had owned 46% of the land under the U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista dictatorship. The Fanjul brothers — children of a marriage that united two of Cuba’s wealthiest sugar families in the early 1900s — had 10 sugar mills, three alcohol distilleries and real estate interests across the country.
Peasants working on sugarcane plantations there lived in abysmal poverty. Sugar production was seasonal and cane cutters only got four months of work a year. They made up an army of the unemployed, continually in debt with their families fighting to get by. Illiteracy was widespread.
An essential part of the powerful uprising by Cuban workers and peasants, led by the new revolutionary government headed by Fidel Castro, was land distribution to the peasants and elimination of the inhuman conditions imposed by the sugar bosses, including the Fanjuls. A massive campaign was carried out to teach workers and peasants to read and write, as well as to bring water, electricity, sanitation, transportation and medical services to rural areas.
The Fanjuls’ properties were nationalized by the workers and farmers as they carried through a socialist revolution. Washington rejected the Cuban government’s proposal to pay for nationalized properties over 20 years. The family mansion in Havana, filled with art purchased with the wealth produced by the labor of the sugar plantation workers, is now Cuba’s Museum of Decorative Arts, open to all.
Like other Cuban bosses who saw their property become part of the patrimony of the Cuban people, the Fanjuls have backed Washington’s decadeslong drive to overturn the revolution and reimpose capitalist property relations. They’ve filed suit in the U.S. seeking to force Cuba to pay exorbitant penalties for the nationalizations.
The Fanjul brothers fled to the U.S. taking a fortune with them and cultivating a network of working relationships with its capitalist class. They bought up a number of large parcels of land for sugar production in the U.S. and in the Dominican Republic.
Today, the Fanjul family owns more than 220,000 acres of land in the U.S. And, like all sugar growers in the country, they profit from the government’s protectionist policies. In 2025, U.S. sugar was marked up 70% above the world market price.
Profiting off of low-paid workers
In every country where the Fanjul family operates, like other capitalist growers, they profit from the backbreaking labor of low-paid workers.
In the Dominican Republic, the Fanjul family is a key owner in Central Romana Corporation, the largest single employer and landowner in the country. It is the largest exporter of sugar to the U.S., supplying major U.S. brands, including Domino and the Hershey company. Sugarcane cutters there make less than $11 a day!
The company-owned batayes where they live have little or no electricity or running water. There is almost no medical care. Only able to live in the batayes as long as they keep working, some labor into their 70s and 80s to avoid eviction or deportation.
Most of the cane cutters are Haitian immigrants or of Haitian descent. Many have worked for Central Romana for decades with deductions taken from their paychecks for promised future pensions. But changes in the national social security system in 2001 to the benefit of the buyers, combined with notorious anti-Haitian discrimination by the government, have blocked them from receiving their benefits.
In 2009 sugarcane workers founded the Sugarcane Workers Union. It has mobilized thousands of workers in marches and pickets demanding their pensions, medical care and rights for undocumented Haitian immigrants and their Dominican-born children. Their union supports Cuba’s revolution and demands Washington get its hands off Cuba.