Alfonso “Alfy” Fanjul
Chairman/CEO, Florida Crystals
Originally published May 2011
My grandmother was American. Alfy’s not basically a Hispanic name. She named me with that when I was a child, and it stuck with me.
My father had a business in New York, a sugar trading firm that owned sugar mills in Cuba. So they would come up on a continuing basis. The United States has been really a second home. Really, it was the first home originally because most of the family went Spain-United States-Cuba through our father’s side … (Pepe): We go back to 1851. Fifty years here. We started the Florida business from scratch.
From Jan. 1 (1959), when Fidel came in, there was no law. I’ve seen people come in and take my father away just because they wanted his car. (Pepe): Our family was not involved in government. The first thing they did was go after the Batista people and then they went after the big business people. The Batista people, they executed a lot of them. Like a million other Cubans, we were able to rebuild our lives here and make this our home and frankly been very happy here in this country.
I hope they consider us men of the future because that’s what we have to be. You can never stop being that. What should be our next move? What should be our next opportunity? The day I don’t have that I think I will tell them that it’s time for me to go.
We had a philosophical objection to the way (the state’s original U.S. Sugar deal) was being done. We would be left with the problem, and they would be left with the cash, and the state would be more in debt and the water management district would have no money. We think you should just concentrate on trying to restore rather than add land and land and land. We have in Florida an enormous amount of land that actually can be used for restoration projects. What we need is money to do them.
I grew up in Florida, business-wise. It was a Democrat state, so I was a Democrat. To me the difference with both parties is really not that great. Fundamentally, I think that I tend more to what the Democratic Party basically stands for. Pepe, on the other hand, came in later. (Pepe): I was in school, in college. I was always active in Republican politics in those days. My father used to kid me I was for Reagan before Reagan was for Reagan. When I came to Florida to work, there were no Republicans really.
Give a businessman a set of rules he learns to play with. You start moving those things around, where he doesn’t know where those things are going, and everybody starts to get nervous.
My father used to tell us all the time, ‘Listen’ — he’d take, I think, four or five sticks, which there are five of us — ‘you take one at a time, break them very easily. Put them together, much harder to break. So stick together.’ I think that has been instilled in us since the day we were born.
Life evolves, and that’s the way we used to cut sugar cane. Now these people sit in machines. It’s one of the better jobs out there in the sugar industry, probably one of the best-paying jobs in Palm Beach County. (Pepe): It’s now been a long, long time we don’t have cutters. When the heat got so high, we decided to get rid of it and go totally mechanized and provide these, which are better jobs. In the end they did us a big favor. We saved a lot of money. We created better jobs.
My father was totally dedicated actually to going back to Cuba to the day he died. That’s what he really hoped he would do. Well, you know, life goes on. (Pepe): And a dream is a dream, and you don’t get rid of your childhood memories easily.
We still eat rice and beans. (Pepe): We still like the Cuban food. We’re Americans. We’re happy with it. We love Italian food, too.
Interview by Mike Vogel
Photo by Scott Wiseman
