Trump’s battle with the Sultans of Sugar

"We have gotten the Mexican side to agree to nearly every request made by US industry," said the US commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, this week as he announced a provisional deal to settle a bitter dispute with Mexico over sugar exports to the US. You could almost hear the relief in his voice a lot hinged on the talks. Botching them could have meant a damaging trade war with Mexico, says the Financial Times. It would also have put the Trump administration on the back foot ahead of crucial renegotiations of the Nafta free-trade deal later this year, for which these talks were seen as a "dress rehearsal". There's just one fly in Ross's sugar bowl: the industry's big barons are refusing to play ball.

The US sugar lobby, whose big beef is that Mexico has been trying to sideline its refineries, is demanding even tighter curbs on refined sugar imports than the "significant concessions" already made, reports Reuters. Leading the charge, as they always do when their interests are threatened, are Florida's Cuban-born "Sultans of Sugar" brothers Alfonso (Alfy, left in our picture) and Jos (Pepe, right) Fanjul. Before being kicked out by Fidel Castro in 1959, the family owned vast plantations on the island and the brothers, now in their 70s, have been scrabbling all their lives to rebuild their sugar fortune. And with great success.

The Fanjul's initial 1960 purchase of a tranche of swampland in Florida has mushroomed into a vast sugar and real-estate conglomerate in the US and Dominican Republic, with subsidiaries including Domino Sugar, Florida Crystals and Tate & Lyle European. Now they never give an inch. As Alfy noted in a rare interview in 2001: "We do not want what happened in Cuba to happen to us again". To head off that danger, both brothers became major backroom players in US politics, says the Financial Times.

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"Alfy and Pepe grew up in the closed world of Havana's colonial aristocracy," says Vanity Fair. They derived their wealth and social cachet from their Spanish mother, Lillian, whose Gomez-Mena clan had dominated the Cuban sugar scene since the 19th century. When the she and their father, also named Alfonso, married in 1936, the two families' holdings were put at $100m, says Wealth-X. Then, in 1959, "Castro rebels threw their guns down on the conference table of the family's HQ" and said: "This will be ours. All of it". The Fanjuls fled soon after.

The family has remade itself (according to Wealth-X, Pepe alone is worth $1.4bn), but they have some way to go before they rebuild the vast fortunes the family once enjoyed. "The essence of the Fanjul brothers' lives in exile has been their relentless determination to get back what they lost in Havana," says Vanity Fair. Time will tell if they achieve that. Meanwhile, there's solace to be had from extracting every last cent they can from the negotiating table. The Fanjuls are, as both the Mexicans and Donald Trump's White House are discovering, "formidable adversaries".