June 20, 2023 • 49 mins
Meet Victor and Selvin, who initially feel lucky to travel from Jamaica to Florida to cut sugarcane. The experiences of cane cutters like them lead two ambitious journalists to try and uncover the devastating truth about the labor supporting the American sugar industry.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to blood, sweat and tears. That's what an armed
man told workers when they arrived in Florida. The workers
were there to cut sugarcane, and that brutal job is
the foundation of our story. It's a story with billions
of dollars at stake, a court case that reached from
Florida to Hollywood, and revelations that will make you look
(00:21):
differently at everything you eat. And it starts with a
man called Power. In Jamaica, it's common to be given
a nickname, not like a shortening of your first name,
but something that says a bit about who you are.
When Selvin Grant was growing up, all the kids called
him Power.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Guys my hage koop. The ares heard of me kadano.
I'm strong. My name is Power.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
He's a tall and athletic guy.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
I'm not big and fat. I'm just like medium built
and very very strong.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
But as you can hear, Selvin is really quite soft
spoken and gentle. As a kid. He liked flying his
kite and going fishing. He didn't use his strength to
pick on other kids.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
I was not a bully. I was a peacemaker.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
In contrast, there's Victor. You're all comfortable and ready to go.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Yes, I'm here.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
His nickname Fidel as in the Cuban Revolutionary Fidel Castro.
When Victor speaks to you, your back straightens.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Listen to me. Let me tell you something. Now, listen
to me. Miss tell you the truth. Miss, let me
tell you something.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
But despite their differences, back when these guys were in
their twenties, they found themselves in a similar situation welcome
boarding an aeroplane for the very first time, going from Kingston,
Jamaica to the United States to Florida.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
I was a bit scary when going to the plane.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
My first time. When I traveled the plane, I feel
like a man and a I feel like more than
a man. Just awesome.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Well, honestly, it was nice.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
When the plane was going up in the air, it
was so scary. Guy, it seems like the plane was
falling apart. You just got very very scary.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Self and Victor are both heading to Florida for the
same reason, they each having their hands a golden ticket
an American work visa.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Well, honestly, I was feeling one hundred person and good.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
I feel like a king in his town and a
light in his den.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
For them, and thousands of others. It's a chance to
go abroad, a chance to make a bunch of money,
a chance to change their lives.
Speaker 4 (02:46):
Welcome to Florida local time.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
When the men touched down in the US, they're filled
with optimism.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
When I come off at West Brombach was a night,
but the whole place light up and it was so pretty.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
I feeling joyful.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
But then things slowly start to change. Along with a
group of other men, they board buses. They don't know
exactly where they're going. They arrive at these buildings barracks
and go inside.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
It was a big please and we are sit down.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Then a guy with two guns strapped to his hips
walks in.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
And say good night, jentleman. Good night, gentlemen. You speak wroth.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
The burly man then says something else. He warns them.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
He said, somebodya got dropped down, somebod y'all got run away,
somebod y'all'll get caught, somebodya goat dead. And remember we
were seven days a week here. It's like he described
with the hardest way.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Then he says something.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Everybody hear him.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
You know what he says, A sentence that would be
permanently etched into Selvin and Victor's minds.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
This is sweat, blood and tears.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Welcome to blood, certain tears.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
Selvin and Victor are about to embark on one of
the most difficult and dangerous jobs in the world. They're
in the US to cut sugar cane.
Speaker 5 (04:21):
It's foracious. Everything about it is backbreaking, punishing work.
Speaker 4 (04:25):
An absolutely miserable job for someone to do.
Speaker 5 (04:29):
It's very hot. There are snakes.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
That's the hardest job in the whole way.
Speaker 5 (04:33):
You can slice off your toe or your foot.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
That's a very very very very very very very hard job.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
It seems so innocent, sugary.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
Hey, hey, hey, kids, let's sing that song.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
You're like no one about yourcde kids love it. It
sits practically enshrined in the center of our tables, cakes, cucanes.
But this is just the facade, like a candy coated shell,
(05:07):
because once you melt that away, underneath there's a very
different reality. Victor in Selvin's American dream and the dream
of thousands of others like them, went very quickly from this.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Honestly, I was here one percent to this. It's just
like I was in prison.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Can sugarcane is like to go to a war.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
You were you like sleeve. You work, You're like sleeve.
Speaker 6 (05:33):
It's like bearing witness to a crime. It's an absolute
theft that's going on.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
How is this even possible legally?
Speaker 1 (05:42):
All the while, just down the road in Palm.
Speaker 7 (05:44):
Beach, they lived the lives of multi millionaires.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Are the people who sell this stuff, who own the
sugarcane farms.
Speaker 6 (05:52):
They were probably one of the richest families in Cuba.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
They have boatloads of money.
Speaker 6 (05:58):
These plantation owners make it extra sixty five million dollars
a year off the sugar program in American consumers.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Over the course of this series, I'll meet the men
who risked everything to cut sugarcane in the United States.
I'll discover the links people will go to take on
the industry and uncover the truth.
Speaker 7 (06:17):
It was the challenge of being David versus Goliath.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
The pursuit of truth and justice led to a decades
long legal battle, costs tens of millions of dollars and
upended lives.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
Like the Titanic, you've been ripped from stem to stern.
Speaker 7 (06:33):
His life has sort of fallen apart.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
And it's like Jesus, you know what else?
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Can go wrong here, but take a step back, because
through the lens of this case, there's so much more
to be revealed about the dark underbelly of sugar, and
I'll discover the links those in power will go to
hide the truth.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
The sugar lobby is one of the most powerful lobbies
in the country.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Using the Everglades as an industry toilet.
Speaker 6 (07:02):
It is just unbearable to the system, to the senses, I.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
Felt ashamed as an American.
Speaker 7 (07:08):
If you can get the president on the phone while
he is breaking up with his girlfriend, you've got a
lot of clout.
Speaker 6 (07:16):
Maybe it actually was a conspiracy.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
I'm Celeste Headley and from iHeartMedia, Imagine Audio, and the
teams at Weekday Fun and Novel. This is Big Sugar
Episode one. Welcome to Blood, Sweat and Tears. Okay, so first,
let me introduce myself. I've spent more than twenty years
(07:42):
as a reporter and anchor with National Public Radio and PBS,
and in that time I've reported on presidential elections, hurricanes,
corporate malfeasans of course dirty politics, but I've never actually
reported on the sugar industry. In fact, I haven't really
covered very much about food at all. But wood is
just the surface of this story. Anyway, As a perpetually underpaid,
(08:04):
overworked single mother, I've always been interested in uncovering the
lives of the disempowered and the comfortable corporate bosses. That's
the story that hooked me immediately, the story of the
cane cutters, which is really about civil rights, inequity, racism,
and backdoor deals. Those are the areas and the topics
I've been drawn to as a journalist for more than
(08:25):
two decades. So to really get into this story, there
was one place I knew I had to go, Florida,
and more specifically to Palm Beach.
Speaker 8 (08:37):
Henry Morris and Flagler announced to the world, I shall
build here a magnificent playground for the people of the nation.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
I landed at West Palm Beach and then took a
twenty minute drive. Okay, am I going out there?
Speaker 3 (08:53):
Should I try to turn around.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Ending up along the boutique lined streets of Palm Beach Island,
the Palm Beach version of so Valentino Brunello Cucinelli.
Speaker 7 (09:04):
Christie's Auction Birch Al Floren kicking knee on the corner.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Yeah, you know who lives here?
Speaker 2 (09:11):
So this off tour.
Speaker 9 (09:13):
Right here is the mar Lago President Trump's home.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Now also at one point or another, Sylvester stallone Bill Gates.
Speaker 8 (09:23):
Owning the boat is just about as common as owning
a TV set in these parts.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
This is the actual marina for Palm Beach. So the say,
a couple hundred feet in front of us is hundreds
of millions of dollars of yachts, just massive, massive yachts.
Speaker 8 (09:41):
The glamour and the glitter. It's enough to make your
eyes pop out. All that luxury, a luxury.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
After I absorbed the side of a marina full of
yachts big enough to have their own weather systems and
popped my eyes back in their sockets, I took a
short drive to see something very different.
Speaker 7 (10:06):
Fifty miles to the west, you have probably one of
the poorest towns in the United States.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
This is Gregshell. He's a lawyer who spent a lot
of time in the town that's just an hour's drive away.
It's called Bell Glade. It sits like a dimple on
the chin of the massive Lake Okechobee, and as you
drive in you see a somewhat weathered wooden sign emblazoned
with the city's motto. The sign in Bell Glade says
her soil is her fortune. That's a reference to the
(10:33):
nutrient rich muck. This town is famous for the turf
that has made it the center of the sugar industry
in Florida. There are hundreds of thousands of acres of
cain around this area. And when we say fields, they're massive,
massive acres and acres of land. You've likely eaten sugar
grown in or around Bell Glade. Twenty percent of what
(10:55):
America produces comes from here. In other words, if you
excuse the sesame street visual, it's in two out of
every ten cookies.
Speaker 7 (11:04):
So as you go into Belglade, you immediately start seeing
your eyes starting to maybe water because of the smoke
in the air.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
That's because of a signature of sugarcane production. Smoke a
lot of it, absolutely, and there's all these abandoned buildings.
It is like the town is on fire.
Speaker 7 (11:24):
You make shark coughing and you smell the mills.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Makes my throat feel awful. Sugarcane is burned when it's
ripe to remove the leaves on the stalks, and it
creates a kind of apocalyptic scene. Flames on the horizon,
black fumes crowding out the oxygen in the air.
Speaker 7 (11:46):
In every sense, you're immediately reminded the fact that sugarcane
controls this town. This town is all about sugarcane.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
In fact, Oh my.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
God, holy cow. There's a tiny little playground right there,
looks like a preschool, completely entirely framed by black pouring
black smoke. And the reason I'm in Belglade this is
where many of the people who came here to cut
the sugarcane back in the nineteen eighties and nineties were living.
Speaker 4 (12:17):
It's really a kind of God forsake in town.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
Alec Wilkinson's a writer and found himself in Belglade when
he was in his thirties.
Speaker 4 (12:26):
I learned that the State Department would send trainees in
the Diplomatic Corps sometimes to Belglade and in order to
acquaint them with the atmosphere of Third world countries.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Alec came to bell Glade in nineteen eighty four because
he was fixated on a question, why were thousands of
men from the Caribbean coming here to cut sugarcane.
Speaker 4 (12:54):
It sounded like such a strange world within a world.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Alex where is kind of a patchwork. He started out
as a rock and roll musician, then became a police officer,
and finally landed on being a writer.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
One is always looking for some sort of for an adventure,
an undertaking that will introduce you to new sites and
sounds and experiences in people and broaden you.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
You hope, okay, so kind of like a Jack London
character or every cheesy dating app bio. Ever, Alec is
always up for an adventure, and when he read a
short article about these Caribbean sugarcane cutters in Florida, he
thought it was odd and maybe there was an adventure
in it. Oh Man, He did not realize the depth
(13:43):
of what he was about to uncover. It's the early
nineteen eighties. Alec pitches his story and the New Yorker
agrees he can go to Florida and check it out.
This is before Google, so one of the first things
most writers would do at the time is meet with
(14:03):
these sugar industry reps.
Speaker 10 (14:05):
Most of the cane is cut by hand over eight
thousand West Indians, mostly from Jamaica, to take advantage of
the opportunity each harvest.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Alex sitting there at the headquarters of the Florida Sugarcane League,
the industry coalition and lobbying group. He's being shown a film.
This movie is their version of what happens on the
farms every year.
Speaker 10 (14:32):
The farmers try to recruit American labor, but there are
a few takers. The job is simply to demanding muscles, ache,
sweat burns, the eyes and untrained hands blister in minutes.
But to watch a West Indian wheeld his knife is
to see a century old art.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
It was as if they were describing a horse that
had to run, or a greyhound that had to run.
These men had to cut sugarcane or they weren't happy.
And if you could see how happy they were when
they were out there cutting cane, if you could see
the big smiles on their faces, you'd know that these
were men who had found their purpose in life, and
(15:14):
their gift from their creator was to find their vocation
in cutting sugarcane.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
This is corporate propaganda at its finest. Imagine somehow West
Indians have an innate need to cut sugarcane whiles Americans
are simply too feeble. Or maybe it could have something
to do with the fact that they come from countries
with very few jobs, and they're desperate for any work,
(15:41):
which seems more likely like me, Alec is skeptical. He
wants to hear from the Caribbean men themselves. What are
their lives really like?
Speaker 4 (15:53):
I asked, very politely if I could meet some sugarcane cutters.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
He's eventually given a tour of a sugar mill, and then.
Speaker 4 (16:00):
I was rather sternly told, you will never meet a
sugar cane cutter. We will make sure of that.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
Thank you for coming, Now be on your way. Nothing
more to see here.
Speaker 4 (16:13):
That for me was the little flag that went up
that said, wanna bet.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
The Florida Sugarcane League had tried to shut down the
wrong guy.
Speaker 4 (16:25):
So that launched my adventure, which was to try to
thwart the interests of the Florida Sugarcane League and preventing
me from meeting any of the sugarcane cutters.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
Bang off to the races, well kind of. After exhausting
the official channels, Alex started trying to find the cutters
in a more haphazard way, basically by simply pulling up
to the sides of the fields.
Speaker 4 (16:55):
Which was an idiot thing to do. I mean, it's
like prison gang work. There's a form in watching you.
They're all working hard and they don't need some fool
coming along with his notebook out and asking them goofy questions.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Okay, so it wasn't off to the smoothest start. Alec
got pretty desperate meandering the streets of Bell Glade.
Speaker 4 (17:16):
I first started trying to find them, you know, sort
of people say, oh, they come into town all the time.
So I'd walk around, you know, and I'd see a
black man who looked vaguely West Indian. I would sort
of say, do you do you excuse me, sir, do
you do you work in the cane And they'd look
at me like I was crazy.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
So plan b. Alec would drive down the highway at
night through the seemingly endless sugar cane fields until he
hit upon.
Speaker 4 (17:45):
These enormous barracks, big cement barracks, like big ocean liners
out there in the fields. It's what they always look
to me like if you would come on them at
night and see them in the distance with the lights on.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
These are the massive building where the cutters lived. They
were guarded and behind fences. You couldn't just go knock
on the door.
Speaker 4 (18:06):
I would park by the side of the road and
I would look sort of longingly through the fence and
I could see them inside the windows. And it was
like I remember looking longingly as an adolescent at the
windows of the girl that I thought I was in
love with, as I would walk past your house at
ten o'clock at night and she'd had no idea, and
(18:27):
I'd try to observe things about them, and you know,
lights go out at ten thirty or something like that.
Speaker 5 (18:32):
I might write.
Speaker 4 (18:34):
You know, for a long time, the Florida Sugarcane Company
had the lock on the cutter community, and they were
right and saying you will never meet a cutter. It
took a lot of effort and a certain amount of
ingenuity to figure out finally how to penetrate that barrier.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
And what he found while it lifted the veil on
the whole industry. More coming up after the break. It's
the early nineteen eighties and writer Alec Wilkinson is trying
(19:11):
to meet sugar cane cutters Caribbean men who are working
on farms in Florida. He suspects something's up that the
industry is trying to hide the reality of the work
these men are doing and the conditions in which they're living.
Behind the fences of these Florida sugarcane farms, Cutters like
Selvin Grant are unaware of all this bubbling outside interest
(19:32):
in their lives. Selvin Grant is one of ten thousand
men who are in Florida to cut cane spread across
more than forty farms. So what's the job like? Well,
for starters, the working day starts early, very early, around
four thirty five am. The lights go on, and.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Then the field manager you have like a speaker allowed
speaker to wake you up in the morning time.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
First it's breakfast. Here's Victor Blackwood.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
Again to a white eggs for a slice of bread,
a copper of coffee, and a bowler parridge. And after
you eat that, you're going to get ready to work.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Then they're taken by bus out to the massive, sprawling fields.
Sugarcane looks like a reed, thick and segmented and tall,
sometimes reaching ten feet high. It's like a dense bush
of bamboo, but with a green fringe on top. The
men bend over to reach the bottom of the stalks,
lift their razor sharp machetes in the air and begin.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Chopping, chopping, chopping, chopping, chump and chopping. Cotton, cotton, cotton,
cotton cony. You bend your back and started cotton. You
just staying and stayed chopping, stabing and stayed chopping.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
One of the hardest parts of the job is the monotony.
Imagine capping, chopping, chopping, chopping, chomping, coping, day in cotton cotton, cotton, cotton,
cotton day, coupp and tupp and tupper and tupper and
tum and covering. Plus there's someone called a pusher. His
job is to loudly encourage the cutters to go faster,
to cut one more stock, one more.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Not one more nuts, sir, one more, not one more.
Speaker 4 (21:14):
Not.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
That means the expression on you to cut more cane.
But some of the people, some of the guys that
really can't go no faster.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Alec watched this intensely repetitive choreography from the side of
the fields as close as he could get.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
This was punishing work of a specificity that was hard
to imagine. Eight hour days of doing this utterly demanding
physical task.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
When I was driving past the fields of sugar cane
in Florida, surrounded by an endless sea of these green reeds.
It really hit home for me just how tough the
job of constantly cutting through these branches must be. When
you get up close to a sugar cane stock that
is a hard, thick plant. This isn't cutting down weeds
(22:06):
in your backyard. I mean that sugar cane is really hard.
I mean, just to imagine the kind of strength that
takes in your arm to wield a Your arm has
to be an unbelievably strong and to make that kind
of movement all day long of cutting through that cane.
But also the machete has got to be razor sharp.
Speaker 4 (22:27):
If you were sort of designing in a kind of
science fiction way, an absolutely miserable job for someone to
do well. Dante and Virgil could have passed through a
sugar cane. Feel that if the Divine Comedy had been
written in the twentieth century.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
The cutting is dirty, relentless, and at the end of
the day, the men struggle to slowly unfurl their tired bodies.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Don't believe you could stand straight out. It will break
in two. Trust me, your buck would break. You get
eventually straighten up. Grab that's so hard the chucka cane is.
That's a very very very very very very very hard job.
I never worked haney job like that.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
You get the picture. In fact, it's so hard. Some
men can't take it. They beg to go home.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Some of those guys couldn't make it the first day.
They're gonna go back to Jamaica.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
The first day, Selvin remembers one guy in particular.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Crying, tears run from his face to go home, back
to Jamaica. That's how hard it is. And it was
so hard.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
The men who stayed and who came back year after
year mostly did it because they didn't have many other options.
It's not like there were loads of jobs waiting for
them back in the Caribbean. Alec was beginning to understand
the life of a sugarcane cutter, a snapshot of what
was going on in the fields. There was no hiding
(23:58):
from the world how hard cutting shit cane was. But
there was a bunch more to uncover, like what about
life in the barracks, what was going on behind the scenes.
And Alec wasn't alone. There was someone else asking these
same questions, a student filmmaker, Stephanie Black. She was in
her twenties.
Speaker 6 (24:17):
At the time, I was young, and I was militant,
and I was very much fight the power and fight
this force.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Stephanie was an idealist who believed in changing the world.
At just nine years old, she was the kind of
kid who organized for her class to buy and wear bracelets,
each dedicated to prisoners of war in Vietnam, with funds
going to efforts to end the conflict. She was filled
with hope, but not always realistic expectations.
Speaker 6 (24:44):
And always quite naive. I must say it, always quite naive.
I remember my first anti nuke march I went to
in Washington, and when I saw, I guess what must
have been ten thousand people? I thought for sure. The
next day, all every single nuclear power plant was chatel.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Stephanie, a little older and wiser, but still just as
passionate to make a difference out in the world, finds
a new cause by the mid nineteen eighties. She wants
to expose the living and working conditions of the Caribbean
sugar cane cutters and a documentary. But she's more or
less in the same situation as Alec, trying to get
into the camps to film, and like Alec, no dice
(25:23):
and then walking around Belglade, the treasure map more or
less falls straight into her lap.
Speaker 6 (25:29):
One day when I was in the town and I
was just walking around and Jamaican woman came up to
me and she said, are you at the Peace Corps?
And I said no, and she said, like, what are
you doing? And I just explained to her that I'm
trying to make this film about the cane cutters who
are brought in to cut sugar cane. And she said,
do you have a car And I said, yeah, I
have a rent a car. And she said, okay, if
(25:51):
you can meet me here at this address tonight, I'll
take you to the camps because I sell on the camps.
But my van is broken. It's in the shop.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Turns out the woman's a merchant, a peddler of sorts
who sells things to the cane cutters at the farms.
She's an entrepreneur. She knows all the ins and outs,
the secret entrances, the times when the guards are off duty.
And what's more, she's willing to share her intel with Stephanie,
basically because she needs a ride to the barracks.
Speaker 6 (26:19):
We would drive for like five miles down a small
dirt like road, and then all of a sudden, you know,
you'd arrive at this giant monstrosity of a barrack, like
in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Alec meanwhile, thinks he's also discovered a way to talk
to the sugar cutters, with some but not much help
from a local fixer who goes by the name Caveman.
He's figured out when he can sneak in when supervisors
aren't there, but even when he gets up close with
the cutters, he finds they don't want to talk. It's
not worth risking their jobs.
Speaker 4 (26:53):
So finally I came up with an embarrassingly simple idea.
I bought a polaroid camera and I went into the
camp and I would take a polaroid of a guy
and I would hand it to the cutter. Over the
course of a week or so, I got known as
picture Man, and I'd show up at the camp and
(27:13):
they go, picture man, Picture Man, take my picture, and
the same thing in the field. You know, I'd sort
of suss out if there was a foreman around, and
if I showed up, they'd all do these extravagant poses
with machetes up over their heads and stuff. Take my picture,
and I'd take it and hand it to them, and
I became familiar to them, and then I just started
(27:34):
to develop some friendships.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
And the men finally start opening up, telling the truth,
revealing just why this has been called the hardest job
in America. More after the break, finally Stephanie and Picture
Man can see firsthand what's actually happening in these camps.
(27:59):
They've both met managed to sneak into the barracks where
dozens of sugarcane cutters live, and through a combination of
charm and polaroid film, they've developed friendships with the cutters,
who start giving them an insight into their lives. So
what's really going on inside the barracks.
Speaker 6 (28:18):
It's just an extremely crowded, compressed situation with men cooking inside.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Everybody's been playing their music. They buy these stereos. They're
gonna be playing music night. You couldn't sleep, You hardly
could sleep.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Even as Stephanie and Aleck learned how brutal the job was,
they were still shocked by what they found here.
Speaker 4 (28:43):
These smelled bad, they were dirty, they were dispiriting. You know,
there were just too many men in them. This was
not exactly like conditions in a prison for starters, a
prism would be an awful lot cleaner.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Varied from camp to camp, but in some of the
larger barracks there could be eight hundred men in a
three story building, sleeping in rows and rows of bunk
beds packed in like sardines. If you were on the
top bunk, you'd drawn the short straw.
Speaker 6 (29:15):
In some of the large barracks, you know, the roof
would be leaking when it rained, and so the men
had to construct like they would tie a rope from
like the foot of their bed the metal bar to
like the top and put a blanket over and make
like a little tent for themselves so the rain would
not hit them.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
There're showers in the middle of some of these barracks
with pretty much no ventilation, so it's dank and humid,
like living in a submarine.
Speaker 6 (29:41):
I felt embarrassed. I felt embarrassed as an American that
we would bring workers to be housed in this way,
and no one could look at that kind of living
situation and feel that it's right. The men did not
have enough privacy. They were on top of each other,
a kind of grin and bed attitude and making the
(30:01):
most of it was a prevailing, really inspiring, you know,
attitude of the men.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Stephanie turned on her camera started getting the men to
tell her on the record how they were feeling. She
wanted the world to know about this.
Speaker 11 (30:18):
You remind us, sir, that in jamaicaira hosband, a father,
a son, and that everyone depending on you. That is
a big achievement to be here working. Each money you
gather at a determination and tell youself that the strange
enessial feel is just for our time.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Each morning you gather all your determination in order to
cut sugarcane and provide for your family after arriving in
a foreign place and giving up your privacy. The final
revelation from these men is that cutting sugarcane is very,
very dangerous. What kind of injuries did you see happen
(31:00):
while you were working there?
Speaker 2 (31:02):
All load?
Speaker 3 (31:02):
Miss doors speak about that? Do speak about that.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
Here's lawyer Greg Shell again, who spent a lot of
time working in Belglade representing farm workers.
Speaker 7 (31:13):
You're swinging a machete eight or ten hours a day,
it's going to slip, or you're going to be careless,
or the field will be uneven or any number of
things that will cause you to accidentally cut yourself. Every year,
it was about a one third of the workers were
injured at work in a manner serious enough that it
required them to miss at least one day of work.
(31:36):
That's an awfully high percentage of the workforce to be
injured during the year.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
Selvin puts it more.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Directly, cans like to go to a war.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
Like going to war. In fact, the cutters almost look
like medieval knights heading out to fight. They wear aluminum
guards in their hands, shins, and their knees like armor,
as well as heavy boots and their feet to protect
themselves from the razor sharp blade on the cane knife.
All the cutters have stories of injuries selfn remembers some
(32:06):
graphic moments. Be warned.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
One of my roommates. He get his finger cut off
clean drop on the ground.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
Selvin's roommate was screaming, trying to pick up the fingers
so it could be reattached.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
I said, man, I gotta be careful. I gotta be careful.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
But being really careful wasn't always enough, because.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
Yeah, when I was lining up to cut sugar cane
and the first tip, I may slice my finger almost
in two and it was burning like fire. I just
don't got my finger didn't fell off.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Selvin was rushed off the field finger bleeding, and.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
They must driver given to the doctor. They dishes back together.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Selvin says he didn't even have anesthetic during the stitches.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
It was burnt in like crazy. Was hurting so bad.
I feel like I'm almost dyeing. It was so painful,
And I don't get a cartline that in a life.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
Cuts were common and painful, but they weren't the worst
thing that could happen. Selvin remembers one guy with a
terrible leg injury.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
I don't know what's wrong with his leg. When you
look at his leg, he's get different color than the
other leg. You say he ain't got no life in
his leg. Tell you the truth. I don't know what
happened to that guy. They take him away. He never
come by, He just disappeared.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
In the eighties, there were an average of ten deaths
each year in the sugar cane industry. We repeatedly asked
the sugarcane farms and their trade groups to respond to
the claims about the living and working conditions on their farms.
In the eighties, and nineties, and the accusation that they
didn't allow journalists to talk to cutters. We got no response.
(34:02):
But all this wasn't new, you see, the sugar cane
industry has relied on people to cut cane by hand
for centuries. Before the seventeenth century, sugar was rare and
in Europe pretty much unheard of. When I say sugar,
I'm referring to the products made from the juice of
sugar cane. For millennia, humans almost never ate it. Something
(34:23):
we now eat daily and don't even think about. Only
really emerged in our diets like three hundred and fifty
years ago. As soon as it did become available, people
couldn't get enough of the sweet things It made, treats,
rum cubes to put in hot drinks. Within two centuries,
sugar became a part of everyday life for people in
Europe at least. And how did this happen well with
(34:47):
the colonization of the Americas and the enslavement of millions
of Africans. These delights that they enjoyed in Europe were
baked off the backs of men, women, and children who
were kidnapped in their home countries, shipped to the United
States and the Caribbean and forced to do the backbreaking
and deadly work of cutting sugarcane. Victor and Selvin's ancestors
(35:12):
were perhaps among them. There's a quote from a French
writer in the seventeen hundreds that expresses it well, I
do not know whether coffee and sugar are essential to
the happiness of Europe, but I do know for certain
that these two plants have been disastrous for two parts
of the world. America has been depopulated in order to
(35:34):
make space for them to grow. Africa is being depopulated
in order to get people to farm them. The Transatlantic
slave trade is one of the most horrific and bitter
chapters of human history. I'm sure hearing that the life
of an enslaved person working on a sugar plantation was
utterly inhumane won't surprise you. But maybe it's surprising to
(35:57):
think that your cake or cookie, or even and yogurt
is fundamentally linked to this shameful history, a history that
some people say continued all the way to the nineteen nineties.
And what I mean by that is the job Selvin
and Victor did on the farms in Florida. Some people
have called it modern day slavery.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
It is like a cousin to slavery.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
I would say, a cousin to slavery. And remember all
this is happening just miles away from glamour and the
glitter in West Palm Beach.
Speaker 8 (36:32):
It's enough to make your eyes pop out. All that luxury.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
It's incredible, a split screen reality, the difference between the
eye popping luxury of West Palm Beach and the brutal
conditions in the fields just an hour down the road. Look,
it's not unusual that the rich live alongside the poor,
but in this case it's extreme. It's not a wealth gap,
it's a canyon. And you know who else lives in
Palm Beach, the people who profit from the work that
(37:00):
Victor and Selvin are doing. I asked Victor if he'd
ever heard the name of the owner of the farm
he spent years working at. Did you ever hear the
name of the owners?
Speaker 3 (37:10):
Did you? No?
Speaker 2 (37:10):
No, no, no no.
Speaker 3 (37:12):
I never hear the owner.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Know, well, I know who owns the farm, and I've
also been to where they live and it's huge. I
mean it looks like a hotel.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
That's a big house.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
And I've seen their super yacht. It's massive. It looks
like a battleship. Right, It's easily bigger than my house.
Speaker 3 (37:33):
I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 4 (37:34):
This yacht was the one that Bill Clinton had spent.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
Time in.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
The owner of this yacht, the owners of these farms.
They were very mysterious to Victor and Selvin and to
me too before embarking on this podcast. But I'm on
a mission to reveal their power, which extends all the
way to the White House, to understand their riches, which
total in the billions, and to uncover their influence not
(38:02):
only on the cutters' lives, but on yours too. Stephanie
and Alec were interviewing cutters and observing their lives in
an attempt to show the world what was going on
in Florida, and what they'd heard had truly horrified them.
But even as they gained the trust of the workers,
one thing became abundantly clear. The sugar farm owners don't
(38:23):
want them stooping.
Speaker 6 (38:24):
Around everywhere you go. It says no trespassing, no trustpassing.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
Stephanie devised some surreptitious strategies for interviewing the cutters down
back roads or in abandoned barracks, and then she started
to notice she was being pulled over like a lot.
Speaker 6 (38:40):
How we became away that the police were monitoring us
was because they would stop us on the roads.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
Stephanie presumed that someone from one of the sugar companies
was giving her license plate numbers to the authorities. So
after getting pulled over again and again, I.
Speaker 6 (38:54):
Would have a rented car. And so what I would
do every two days is drive the two hours back
to West pom Beach where I rented the car and
switched the car, and then come back and then we'd have,
you know, a different car with different plates. The work
is thought that was like quite a music. I mean
they really like they didn't get it at all, Like
because every time I would drive up to the camp,
like we would come in a different car. They were
(39:15):
just like, how many cars.
Speaker 7 (39:16):
Do you have?
Speaker 1 (39:19):
Then one day, when she'd been secretly filming in one
of the barracks where the cutters were living.
Speaker 6 (39:24):
It was one afternoon that we came to film and
then we were just getting back in the car to leave,
and I accidentally lacked the keys in the car.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
Stephanie and her whole crew are stuck there. The camp
manager isn't away for long and the clock is ticking.
Speaker 6 (39:43):
So we were stuck outside the car, and then the
camp manager or white man drove up like, okay, are
we going to get out of this one?
Speaker 2 (39:51):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (39:51):
You know.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
They're standing there cameras in hand. I mean, it's got
to be pretty obvious what they're doing.
Speaker 6 (39:58):
And just as his car striving up, one of the
king cutters came out of the barrack with a blanket,
put it over the camera, and swiftly under his arm,
carried it into the barracks. The camp manager presumed that
we were working girls and explained to us, you know,
after we were done here, we should come see him.
(40:21):
And then the men brought out the camera and brought
out a hanger and helped us break into the car
and leave.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
This story is part of a pattern that's becoming more
and more pronounced as our team investigates the sugar industry.
How far the managers and the sugar companies will go
to maintain secrecy to avoid outside oversight and dodge questions.
And anytime you try to prevent journalists from seeing what
you're doing, it makes us suspicious. Both Stephanie and Alec
(40:53):
persevered for months, kept digging. Eventually they came to get
a feel for the routines and the lives of the cutters.
Speaker 6 (41:01):
The life force in the barracks is strong and beautiful
in a way because it's home, cooking one's own food,
you know, listening to the music, writing letters, home playing
Domino's tailors would be sewing. You know, you'd see them
and doing as much as they can to make themselves comfortable.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
The sugarcane season lasts from around late October to mid March,
so the Cutters were in America for around six months,
and often they'd come back year after year. Imagine being
away from your friends and family for such long stretches
of time.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
Yeah, I missed them. I've not seen them, but I
still feel good at working some money so I could
better my life and dear life.
Speaker 4 (41:43):
They were all suffering to be there. They'd left behind families,
some of them they left behind girlfriends, some of them
with no idea whether or not their wives and girlfriends
were being faithful to them.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
They'd keep in touch by writing letters, often waiting two
weeks for a response. We managed to get our hands
on some that people we'd interviewed had kept. One man
wrote to his mother, how keeping, I hope you are fine.
I just write these few lines to let you know
that I reached safe. The plane ride was very exciting
for me. We landed at West Palm Beach at ten
(42:15):
twenty pm. At the camp, it was exciting for me
because life there is like a boarding school, and it
was my first experience. Each morning, breakfast starts serving at
four am, lunch at ten am, dinner at four pm.
But because of hard work, that amount of food can't
keep us, so you got to buy groceries for yourself
so that you can eat extra. The work is very hard,
(42:36):
but I'm going to stick with it because i'd like
to take back some nice things for you and for
my brothers and sisters. Dear mother, I'm hoping that you
all did have a wonderful Christmas. I'm so sorry I
couldn't be at home with you all, but I'm trying
to work and achieve some things. The conditions here it's
really rough. So Mom, here, I send you this small's
(42:57):
money to help with the light bill. Please don't laugh it.
So give my kind of regards to the entire family
and let them know I miss them. But I am
just continuing the days left because I know the crop
will soon be over. I will try again next season,
your big son John. Stephanie actually included some of these
(43:17):
letters and the responses from their wives in her documentary.
Speaker 12 (43:21):
Hello Ovin, good day to you. Hope you're fine. I've
received your letter, and I also received the money, and
I was grateful for it. My mother help me on
the farm while you're away, and sometimes she sleep with me.
Whenever I miss you and my mind runs on you,
I just take up the picture and look at it,
(43:43):
and it reminds me of you.
Speaker 3 (43:46):
When you get that letter from your wife, it's like Christmas. Man,
I tell you feel good and nice. You're here for
your family at home. I know that it am I right.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
And speaking of Christmas, Victor spent twelve years cutting cane,
which also meant twelve holiday seasons separated from his family
by hundreds of miles and vast expanses of water. To
keep close, Victor would send his wife festive love letters,
but he's not that eager to give us details.
Speaker 3 (44:14):
No no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no go there. You were supposed
to a love words, so you shouldn't better ask me that.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
We'll leave the love words to your imagination. Independently, but
almost in tandem, Alec and Stephanie began to get to
the bottom of some of the mysteries. What the lives
of these cutters were like, where they were living, the
reality of the job they were doing. But like the
cane smoke obscuring the air, there was still the fog
of one question surrounding them. Beyond the terrible living standards
(44:50):
and the horrific injuries, there was something else which would
make this a story worth telling.
Speaker 4 (44:55):
I had always heard that the cutters were discontent about
them out of money they were paid. The amount they
were paid didn't seem to correspond in any discernible way
to the work they were doing.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
We know when the cane cutters arrived in a field
each morning they were told how much they would get
for cutting a row of sugar cane. But we also
know that this amount would often change. Imagine one day
you cut a row and earn forty dollars, but the
next day, for a similar row, you're told you'll get
just twenty dollars. You don't know what's going on. It
seems almost random and unfair. One worker told Stephanie.
Speaker 9 (45:35):
I always be the hard work, you know. That's how
I've even known from them. Throwing out a hard work
doesn't really bot of me, is just to get paid
what Sometime it doesn't work that way.
Speaker 1 (45:49):
Another worker showed Stephanie his pacelip. He got injured and
couldn't work all the time. But the food and board
isn't free for the workers. They have to pay to
live in the barracks and for the food they were supplied,
which by all accounts was far from gourmet. So this
guy couldn't work and he was still charged. At the
end of the two weeks, he'd earned just ten dollars.
(46:12):
This whole issue of how much the cutters were getting
paid was really confusing to everyone.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
I really thought I would be getting more money when
I paid what they was giving us. Sometime I worked
twenty dollars for a day, dollars for the day, eighteen
dollars a day. But I need Jamaica far coming to
work so hard that his a little bit of money.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
Victor says that there was no recourse if you complained,
no one listened, or they threatened to send you back home.
Speaker 3 (46:43):
Ye would ask no question. Nobody wanted to appay you
no mind, you work your like sleeve. You work your
like sleeve.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
Alex started sniffing around and the reaction he got from
the sugar industry made him think he might be onto something.
Speaker 4 (46:59):
The one question you would never get an answer to.
The response to asking how are the cutters paid would
either be a cheerful kind of oh, it's too complicated
to explain, to a kind of I think our interviews
over now. It was another one of those you will
never find this out challenges. Priority number one for me
was trying to understand the lives of the cutters, and
(47:21):
one a was sort of, well, I do need to
figure out how these guys are paid. And it was
a huge secret in the industry. It was possibly the
most closely guarded secret that the industry had.
Speaker 1 (47:36):
This payment question is the driving force behind much of
what was to come. It would be a catalyst, a
catalyst that would launch a landmark court case, a legal
battle with unintended consequences for the lives of these cutters,
the city of Belglade, and the whole sugar industry. Next time,
how is this even possible legally? How a group of
(48:00):
lawyers decided to get to the bottom of this payment puzzle.
Speaker 2 (48:03):
An insanely complicated system to figure out from scratch.
Speaker 1 (48:09):
How they came up with a theory and gathered their
evidence was that a little like a smoking gun, uh yeah,
and decided to take on a powerful, relentless and protective industry.
Speaker 7 (48:21):
If they were right, then these workers were owed tens
of millions of dollars next to wages.
Speaker 1 (48:26):
That's next time on Big Sugar. Big Sugar is produced
by Imagine Audio, Weekday Fund Productions and Novel for iHeartMedia.
The series is hosted by me Celeste Henley. Big Sugar
is produced by Jeff Eisenman at Weekday Fund Productions. It's
(48:48):
executive produced by Karl Welker, Nathan Kloke, and Marie Brenner.
Story editor and executive producer is Joe Wheeler. The researcher
is na Aya Metti. Production management from Scherie Houston, Frankie Taylor,
and Charlotte Wolfe. Our fact checker is Sona Avakian. Field
reporting by Amber Amortige and Peter Hayden. Sound design and
(49:11):
mixing by Eli Block, Naomi Clark, and Daniel Kempsen. Original
music composed by Troy McCubbin at Alloy tracks, additional music
by Nicholas Alexander. Special thanks to Alec Wilkinson, author of
the book Big Sugar, and Stephanie Black, director of the
documentary H two Worker. Big Sugar is based on the
(49:32):
Vanity Fair article in the Kingdom of Big Sugar by
Marie Branner
Welcome to blood, sweat and tears. That's what an armed
man told workers when they arrived in Florida. The workers
were there to cut sugarcane, and that brutal job is
the foundation of our story. It's a story with billions
of dollars at stake, a court case that reached from
Florida to Hollywood, and revelations that will make you look
(00:21):
differently at everything you eat. And it starts with a
man called Power. In Jamaica, it's common to be given
a nickname, not like a shortening of your first name,
but something that says a bit about who you are.
When Selvin Grant was growing up, all the kids called
him Power.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Guys my hage koop. The ares heard of me kadano.
I'm strong. My name is Power.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
He's a tall and athletic guy.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
I'm not big and fat. I'm just like medium built
and very very strong.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
But as you can hear, Selvin is really quite soft
spoken and gentle. As a kid. He liked flying his
kite and going fishing. He didn't use his strength to
pick on other kids.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
I was not a bully. I was a peacemaker.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
In contrast, there's Victor. You're all comfortable and ready to go.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Yes, I'm here.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
His nickname Fidel as in the Cuban Revolutionary Fidel Castro.
When Victor speaks to you, your back straightens.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Listen to me. Let me tell you something. Now, listen
to me. Miss tell you the truth. Miss, let me
tell you something.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
But despite their differences, back when these guys were in
their twenties, they found themselves in a similar situation welcome
boarding an aeroplane for the very first time, going from Kingston,
Jamaica to the United States to Florida.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
I was a bit scary when going to the plane.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
My first time. When I traveled the plane, I feel
like a man and a I feel like more than
a man. Just awesome.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Well, honestly, it was nice.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
When the plane was going up in the air, it
was so scary. Guy, it seems like the plane was
falling apart. You just got very very scary.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Self and Victor are both heading to Florida for the
same reason, they each having their hands a golden ticket
an American work visa.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Well, honestly, I was feeling one hundred person and good.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
I feel like a king in his town and a
light in his den.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
For them, and thousands of others. It's a chance to
go abroad, a chance to make a bunch of money,
a chance to change their lives.
Speaker 4 (02:46):
Welcome to Florida local time.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
When the men touched down in the US, they're filled
with optimism.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
When I come off at West Brombach was a night,
but the whole place light up and it was so pretty.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
I feeling joyful.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
But then things slowly start to change. Along with a
group of other men, they board buses. They don't know
exactly where they're going. They arrive at these buildings barracks
and go inside.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
It was a big please and we are sit down.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Then a guy with two guns strapped to his hips
walks in.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
And say good night, jentleman. Good night, gentlemen. You speak wroth.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
The burly man then says something else. He warns them.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
He said, somebodya got dropped down, somebod y'all got run away,
somebod y'all'll get caught, somebodya goat dead. And remember we
were seven days a week here. It's like he described
with the hardest way.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Then he says something.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Everybody hear him.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
You know what he says, A sentence that would be
permanently etched into Selvin and Victor's minds.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
This is sweat, blood and tears.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Welcome to blood, certain tears.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
Selvin and Victor are about to embark on one of
the most difficult and dangerous jobs in the world. They're
in the US to cut sugar cane.
Speaker 5 (04:21):
It's foracious. Everything about it is backbreaking, punishing work.
Speaker 4 (04:25):
An absolutely miserable job for someone to do.
Speaker 5 (04:29):
It's very hot. There are snakes.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
That's the hardest job in the whole way.
Speaker 5 (04:33):
You can slice off your toe or your foot.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
That's a very very very very very very very hard job.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
It seems so innocent, sugary.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
Hey, hey, hey, kids, let's sing that song.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
You're like no one about yourcde kids love it. It
sits practically enshrined in the center of our tables, cakes, cucanes.
But this is just the facade, like a candy coated shell,
(05:07):
because once you melt that away, underneath there's a very
different reality. Victor in Selvin's American dream and the dream
of thousands of others like them, went very quickly from this.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Honestly, I was here one percent to this. It's just
like I was in prison.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Can sugarcane is like to go to a war.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
You were you like sleeve. You work, You're like sleeve.
Speaker 6 (05:33):
It's like bearing witness to a crime. It's an absolute
theft that's going on.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
How is this even possible legally?
Speaker 1 (05:42):
All the while, just down the road in Palm.
Speaker 7 (05:44):
Beach, they lived the lives of multi millionaires.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Are the people who sell this stuff, who own the
sugarcane farms.
Speaker 6 (05:52):
They were probably one of the richest families in Cuba.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
They have boatloads of money.
Speaker 6 (05:58):
These plantation owners make it extra sixty five million dollars
a year off the sugar program in American consumers.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Over the course of this series, I'll meet the men
who risked everything to cut sugarcane in the United States.
I'll discover the links people will go to take on
the industry and uncover the truth.
Speaker 7 (06:17):
It was the challenge of being David versus Goliath.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
The pursuit of truth and justice led to a decades
long legal battle, costs tens of millions of dollars and
upended lives.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
Like the Titanic, you've been ripped from stem to stern.
Speaker 7 (06:33):
His life has sort of fallen apart.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
And it's like Jesus, you know what else?
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Can go wrong here, but take a step back, because
through the lens of this case, there's so much more
to be revealed about the dark underbelly of sugar, and
I'll discover the links those in power will go to
hide the truth.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
The sugar lobby is one of the most powerful lobbies
in the country.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Using the Everglades as an industry toilet.
Speaker 6 (07:02):
It is just unbearable to the system, to the senses, I.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
Felt ashamed as an American.
Speaker 7 (07:08):
If you can get the president on the phone while
he is breaking up with his girlfriend, you've got a
lot of clout.
Speaker 6 (07:16):
Maybe it actually was a conspiracy.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
I'm Celeste Headley and from iHeartMedia, Imagine Audio, and the
teams at Weekday Fun and Novel. This is Big Sugar
Episode one. Welcome to Blood, Sweat and Tears. Okay, so first,
let me introduce myself. I've spent more than twenty years
(07:42):
as a reporter and anchor with National Public Radio and PBS,
and in that time I've reported on presidential elections, hurricanes,
corporate malfeasans of course dirty politics, but I've never actually
reported on the sugar industry. In fact, I haven't really
covered very much about food at all. But wood is
just the surface of this story. Anyway, As a perpetually underpaid,
(08:04):
overworked single mother, I've always been interested in uncovering the
lives of the disempowered and the comfortable corporate bosses. That's
the story that hooked me immediately, the story of the
cane cutters, which is really about civil rights, inequity, racism,
and backdoor deals. Those are the areas and the topics
I've been drawn to as a journalist for more than
(08:25):
two decades. So to really get into this story, there
was one place I knew I had to go, Florida,
and more specifically to Palm Beach.
Speaker 8 (08:37):
Henry Morris and Flagler announced to the world, I shall
build here a magnificent playground for the people of the nation.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
I landed at West Palm Beach and then took a
twenty minute drive. Okay, am I going out there?
Speaker 3 (08:53):
Should I try to turn around.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Ending up along the boutique lined streets of Palm Beach Island,
the Palm Beach version of so Valentino Brunello Cucinelli.
Speaker 7 (09:04):
Christie's Auction Birch Al Floren kicking knee on the corner.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Yeah, you know who lives here?
Speaker 2 (09:11):
So this off tour.
Speaker 9 (09:13):
Right here is the mar Lago President Trump's home.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Now also at one point or another, Sylvester stallone Bill Gates.
Speaker 8 (09:23):
Owning the boat is just about as common as owning
a TV set in these parts.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
This is the actual marina for Palm Beach. So the say,
a couple hundred feet in front of us is hundreds
of millions of dollars of yachts, just massive, massive yachts.
Speaker 8 (09:41):
The glamour and the glitter. It's enough to make your
eyes pop out. All that luxury, a luxury.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
After I absorbed the side of a marina full of
yachts big enough to have their own weather systems and
popped my eyes back in their sockets, I took a
short drive to see something very different.
Speaker 7 (10:06):
Fifty miles to the west, you have probably one of
the poorest towns in the United States.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
This is Gregshell. He's a lawyer who spent a lot
of time in the town that's just an hour's drive away.
It's called Bell Glade. It sits like a dimple on
the chin of the massive Lake Okechobee, and as you
drive in you see a somewhat weathered wooden sign emblazoned
with the city's motto. The sign in Bell Glade says
her soil is her fortune. That's a reference to the
(10:33):
nutrient rich muck. This town is famous for the turf
that has made it the center of the sugar industry
in Florida. There are hundreds of thousands of acres of
cain around this area. And when we say fields, they're massive,
massive acres and acres of land. You've likely eaten sugar
grown in or around Bell Glade. Twenty percent of what
(10:55):
America produces comes from here. In other words, if you
excuse the sesame street visual, it's in two out of
every ten cookies.
Speaker 7 (11:04):
So as you go into Belglade, you immediately start seeing
your eyes starting to maybe water because of the smoke
in the air.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
That's because of a signature of sugarcane production. Smoke a
lot of it, absolutely, and there's all these abandoned buildings.
It is like the town is on fire.
Speaker 7 (11:24):
You make shark coughing and you smell the mills.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Makes my throat feel awful. Sugarcane is burned when it's
ripe to remove the leaves on the stalks, and it
creates a kind of apocalyptic scene. Flames on the horizon,
black fumes crowding out the oxygen in the air.
Speaker 7 (11:46):
In every sense, you're immediately reminded the fact that sugarcane
controls this town. This town is all about sugarcane.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
In fact, Oh my.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
God, holy cow. There's a tiny little playground right there,
looks like a preschool, completely entirely framed by black pouring
black smoke. And the reason I'm in Belglade this is
where many of the people who came here to cut
the sugarcane back in the nineteen eighties and nineties were living.
Speaker 4 (12:17):
It's really a kind of God forsake in town.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
Alec Wilkinson's a writer and found himself in Belglade when
he was in his thirties.
Speaker 4 (12:26):
I learned that the State Department would send trainees in
the Diplomatic Corps sometimes to Belglade and in order to
acquaint them with the atmosphere of Third world countries.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Alec came to bell Glade in nineteen eighty four because
he was fixated on a question, why were thousands of
men from the Caribbean coming here to cut sugarcane.
Speaker 4 (12:54):
It sounded like such a strange world within a world.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Alex where is kind of a patchwork. He started out
as a rock and roll musician, then became a police officer,
and finally landed on being a writer.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
One is always looking for some sort of for an adventure,
an undertaking that will introduce you to new sites and
sounds and experiences in people and broaden you.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
You hope, okay, so kind of like a Jack London
character or every cheesy dating app bio. Ever, Alec is
always up for an adventure, and when he read a
short article about these Caribbean sugarcane cutters in Florida, he
thought it was odd and maybe there was an adventure
in it. Oh Man, He did not realize the depth
(13:43):
of what he was about to uncover. It's the early
nineteen eighties. Alec pitches his story and the New Yorker
agrees he can go to Florida and check it out.
This is before Google, so one of the first things
most writers would do at the time is meet with
(14:03):
these sugar industry reps.
Speaker 10 (14:05):
Most of the cane is cut by hand over eight
thousand West Indians, mostly from Jamaica, to take advantage of
the opportunity each harvest.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Alex sitting there at the headquarters of the Florida Sugarcane League,
the industry coalition and lobbying group. He's being shown a film.
This movie is their version of what happens on the
farms every year.
Speaker 10 (14:32):
The farmers try to recruit American labor, but there are
a few takers. The job is simply to demanding muscles, ache,
sweat burns, the eyes and untrained hands blister in minutes.
But to watch a West Indian wheeld his knife is
to see a century old art.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
It was as if they were describing a horse that
had to run, or a greyhound that had to run.
These men had to cut sugarcane or they weren't happy.
And if you could see how happy they were when
they were out there cutting cane, if you could see
the big smiles on their faces, you'd know that these
were men who had found their purpose in life, and
(15:14):
their gift from their creator was to find their vocation
in cutting sugarcane.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
This is corporate propaganda at its finest. Imagine somehow West
Indians have an innate need to cut sugarcane whiles Americans
are simply too feeble. Or maybe it could have something
to do with the fact that they come from countries
with very few jobs, and they're desperate for any work,
(15:41):
which seems more likely like me, Alec is skeptical. He
wants to hear from the Caribbean men themselves. What are
their lives really like?
Speaker 4 (15:53):
I asked, very politely if I could meet some sugarcane cutters.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
He's eventually given a tour of a sugar mill, and then.
Speaker 4 (16:00):
I was rather sternly told, you will never meet a
sugar cane cutter. We will make sure of that.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
Thank you for coming, Now be on your way. Nothing
more to see here.
Speaker 4 (16:13):
That for me was the little flag that went up
that said, wanna bet.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
The Florida Sugarcane League had tried to shut down the
wrong guy.
Speaker 4 (16:25):
So that launched my adventure, which was to try to
thwart the interests of the Florida Sugarcane League and preventing
me from meeting any of the sugarcane cutters.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
Bang off to the races, well kind of. After exhausting
the official channels, Alex started trying to find the cutters
in a more haphazard way, basically by simply pulling up
to the sides of the fields.
Speaker 4 (16:55):
Which was an idiot thing to do. I mean, it's
like prison gang work. There's a form in watching you.
They're all working hard and they don't need some fool
coming along with his notebook out and asking them goofy questions.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Okay, so it wasn't off to the smoothest start. Alec
got pretty desperate meandering the streets of Bell Glade.
Speaker 4 (17:16):
I first started trying to find them, you know, sort
of people say, oh, they come into town all the time.
So I'd walk around, you know, and I'd see a
black man who looked vaguely West Indian. I would sort
of say, do you do you excuse me, sir, do
you do you work in the cane And they'd look
at me like I was crazy.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
So plan b. Alec would drive down the highway at
night through the seemingly endless sugar cane fields until he
hit upon.
Speaker 4 (17:45):
These enormous barracks, big cement barracks, like big ocean liners
out there in the fields. It's what they always look
to me like if you would come on them at
night and see them in the distance with the lights on.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
These are the massive building where the cutters lived. They
were guarded and behind fences. You couldn't just go knock
on the door.
Speaker 4 (18:06):
I would park by the side of the road and
I would look sort of longingly through the fence and
I could see them inside the windows. And it was
like I remember looking longingly as an adolescent at the
windows of the girl that I thought I was in
love with, as I would walk past your house at
ten o'clock at night and she'd had no idea, and
(18:27):
I'd try to observe things about them, and you know,
lights go out at ten thirty or something like that.
Speaker 5 (18:32):
I might write.
Speaker 4 (18:34):
You know, for a long time, the Florida Sugarcane Company
had the lock on the cutter community, and they were
right and saying you will never meet a cutter. It
took a lot of effort and a certain amount of
ingenuity to figure out finally how to penetrate that barrier.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
And what he found while it lifted the veil on
the whole industry. More coming up after the break. It's
the early nineteen eighties and writer Alec Wilkinson is trying
(19:11):
to meet sugar cane cutters Caribbean men who are working
on farms in Florida. He suspects something's up that the
industry is trying to hide the reality of the work
these men are doing and the conditions in which they're living.
Behind the fences of these Florida sugarcane farms, Cutters like
Selvin Grant are unaware of all this bubbling outside interest
(19:32):
in their lives. Selvin Grant is one of ten thousand
men who are in Florida to cut cane spread across
more than forty farms. So what's the job like? Well,
for starters, the working day starts early, very early, around
four thirty five am. The lights go on, and.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Then the field manager you have like a speaker allowed
speaker to wake you up in the morning time.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
First it's breakfast. Here's Victor Blackwood.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
Again to a white eggs for a slice of bread,
a copper of coffee, and a bowler parridge. And after
you eat that, you're going to get ready to work.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Then they're taken by bus out to the massive, sprawling fields.
Sugarcane looks like a reed, thick and segmented and tall,
sometimes reaching ten feet high. It's like a dense bush
of bamboo, but with a green fringe on top. The
men bend over to reach the bottom of the stalks,
lift their razor sharp machetes in the air and begin.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Chopping, chopping, chopping, chopping, chump and chopping. Cotton, cotton, cotton,
cotton cony. You bend your back and started cotton. You
just staying and stayed chopping, stabing and stayed chopping.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
One of the hardest parts of the job is the monotony.
Imagine capping, chopping, chopping, chopping, chomping, coping, day in cotton cotton, cotton, cotton,
cotton day, coupp and tupp and tupper and tupper and
tum and covering. Plus there's someone called a pusher. His
job is to loudly encourage the cutters to go faster,
to cut one more stock, one more.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Not one more nuts, sir, one more, not one more.
Speaker 4 (21:14):
Not.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
That means the expression on you to cut more cane.
But some of the people, some of the guys that
really can't go no faster.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Alec watched this intensely repetitive choreography from the side of
the fields as close as he could get.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
This was punishing work of a specificity that was hard
to imagine. Eight hour days of doing this utterly demanding
physical task.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
When I was driving past the fields of sugar cane
in Florida, surrounded by an endless sea of these green reeds.
It really hit home for me just how tough the
job of constantly cutting through these branches must be. When
you get up close to a sugar cane stock that
is a hard, thick plant. This isn't cutting down weeds
(22:06):
in your backyard. I mean that sugar cane is really hard.
I mean, just to imagine the kind of strength that
takes in your arm to wield a Your arm has
to be an unbelievably strong and to make that kind
of movement all day long of cutting through that cane.
But also the machete has got to be razor sharp.
Speaker 4 (22:27):
If you were sort of designing in a kind of
science fiction way, an absolutely miserable job for someone to
do well. Dante and Virgil could have passed through a
sugar cane. Feel that if the Divine Comedy had been
written in the twentieth century.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
The cutting is dirty, relentless, and at the end of
the day, the men struggle to slowly unfurl their tired bodies.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Don't believe you could stand straight out. It will break
in two. Trust me, your buck would break. You get
eventually straighten up. Grab that's so hard the chucka cane is.
That's a very very very very very very very hard job.
I never worked haney job like that.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
You get the picture. In fact, it's so hard. Some
men can't take it. They beg to go home.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Some of those guys couldn't make it the first day.
They're gonna go back to Jamaica.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
The first day, Selvin remembers one guy in particular.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Crying, tears run from his face to go home, back
to Jamaica. That's how hard it is. And it was
so hard.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
The men who stayed and who came back year after
year mostly did it because they didn't have many other options.
It's not like there were loads of jobs waiting for
them back in the Caribbean. Alec was beginning to understand
the life of a sugarcane cutter, a snapshot of what
was going on in the fields. There was no hiding
(23:58):
from the world how hard cutting shit cane was. But
there was a bunch more to uncover, like what about
life in the barracks, what was going on behind the scenes.
And Alec wasn't alone. There was someone else asking these
same questions, a student filmmaker, Stephanie Black. She was in
her twenties.
Speaker 6 (24:17):
At the time, I was young, and I was militant,
and I was very much fight the power and fight
this force.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Stephanie was an idealist who believed in changing the world.
At just nine years old, she was the kind of
kid who organized for her class to buy and wear bracelets,
each dedicated to prisoners of war in Vietnam, with funds
going to efforts to end the conflict. She was filled
with hope, but not always realistic expectations.
Speaker 6 (24:44):
And always quite naive. I must say it, always quite naive.
I remember my first anti nuke march I went to
in Washington, and when I saw, I guess what must
have been ten thousand people? I thought for sure. The
next day, all every single nuclear power plant was chatel.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Stephanie, a little older and wiser, but still just as
passionate to make a difference out in the world, finds
a new cause by the mid nineteen eighties. She wants
to expose the living and working conditions of the Caribbean
sugar cane cutters and a documentary. But she's more or
less in the same situation as Alec, trying to get
into the camps to film, and like Alec, no dice
(25:23):
and then walking around Belglade, the treasure map more or
less falls straight into her lap.
Speaker 6 (25:29):
One day when I was in the town and I
was just walking around and Jamaican woman came up to
me and she said, are you at the Peace Corps?
And I said no, and she said, like, what are
you doing? And I just explained to her that I'm
trying to make this film about the cane cutters who
are brought in to cut sugar cane. And she said,
do you have a car And I said, yeah, I
have a rent a car. And she said, okay, if
(25:51):
you can meet me here at this address tonight, I'll
take you to the camps because I sell on the camps.
But my van is broken. It's in the shop.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Turns out the woman's a merchant, a peddler of sorts
who sells things to the cane cutters at the farms.
She's an entrepreneur. She knows all the ins and outs,
the secret entrances, the times when the guards are off duty.
And what's more, she's willing to share her intel with Stephanie,
basically because she needs a ride to the barracks.
Speaker 6 (26:19):
We would drive for like five miles down a small
dirt like road, and then all of a sudden, you know,
you'd arrive at this giant monstrosity of a barrack, like
in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Alec meanwhile, thinks he's also discovered a way to talk
to the sugar cutters, with some but not much help
from a local fixer who goes by the name Caveman.
He's figured out when he can sneak in when supervisors
aren't there, but even when he gets up close with
the cutters, he finds they don't want to talk. It's
not worth risking their jobs.
Speaker 4 (26:53):
So finally I came up with an embarrassingly simple idea.
I bought a polaroid camera and I went into the
camp and I would take a polaroid of a guy
and I would hand it to the cutter. Over the
course of a week or so, I got known as
picture Man, and I'd show up at the camp and
(27:13):
they go, picture man, Picture Man, take my picture, and
the same thing in the field. You know, I'd sort
of suss out if there was a foreman around, and
if I showed up, they'd all do these extravagant poses
with machetes up over their heads and stuff. Take my picture,
and I'd take it and hand it to them, and
I became familiar to them, and then I just started
(27:34):
to develop some friendships.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
And the men finally start opening up, telling the truth,
revealing just why this has been called the hardest job
in America. More after the break, finally Stephanie and Picture
Man can see firsthand what's actually happening in these camps.
(27:59):
They've both met managed to sneak into the barracks where
dozens of sugarcane cutters live, and through a combination of
charm and polaroid film, they've developed friendships with the cutters,
who start giving them an insight into their lives. So
what's really going on inside the barracks.
Speaker 6 (28:18):
It's just an extremely crowded, compressed situation with men cooking inside.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Everybody's been playing their music. They buy these stereos. They're
gonna be playing music night. You couldn't sleep, You hardly
could sleep.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Even as Stephanie and Aleck learned how brutal the job was,
they were still shocked by what they found here.
Speaker 4 (28:43):
These smelled bad, they were dirty, they were dispiriting. You know,
there were just too many men in them. This was
not exactly like conditions in a prison for starters, a
prism would be an awful lot cleaner.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Varied from camp to camp, but in some of the
larger barracks there could be eight hundred men in a
three story building, sleeping in rows and rows of bunk
beds packed in like sardines. If you were on the
top bunk, you'd drawn the short straw.
Speaker 6 (29:15):
In some of the large barracks, you know, the roof
would be leaking when it rained, and so the men
had to construct like they would tie a rope from
like the foot of their bed the metal bar to
like the top and put a blanket over and make
like a little tent for themselves so the rain would
not hit them.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
There're showers in the middle of some of these barracks
with pretty much no ventilation, so it's dank and humid,
like living in a submarine.
Speaker 6 (29:41):
I felt embarrassed. I felt embarrassed as an American that
we would bring workers to be housed in this way,
and no one could look at that kind of living
situation and feel that it's right. The men did not
have enough privacy. They were on top of each other,
a kind of grin and bed attitude and making the
(30:01):
most of it was a prevailing, really inspiring, you know,
attitude of the men.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Stephanie turned on her camera started getting the men to
tell her on the record how they were feeling. She
wanted the world to know about this.
Speaker 11 (30:18):
You remind us, sir, that in jamaicaira hosband, a father,
a son, and that everyone depending on you. That is
a big achievement to be here working. Each money you
gather at a determination and tell youself that the strange
enessial feel is just for our time.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Each morning you gather all your determination in order to
cut sugarcane and provide for your family after arriving in
a foreign place and giving up your privacy. The final
revelation from these men is that cutting sugarcane is very,
very dangerous. What kind of injuries did you see happen
(31:00):
while you were working there?
Speaker 2 (31:02):
All load?
Speaker 3 (31:02):
Miss doors speak about that? Do speak about that.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
Here's lawyer Greg Shell again, who spent a lot of
time working in Belglade representing farm workers.
Speaker 7 (31:13):
You're swinging a machete eight or ten hours a day,
it's going to slip, or you're going to be careless,
or the field will be uneven or any number of
things that will cause you to accidentally cut yourself. Every year,
it was about a one third of the workers were
injured at work in a manner serious enough that it
required them to miss at least one day of work.
(31:36):
That's an awfully high percentage of the workforce to be
injured during the year.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
Selvin puts it more.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Directly, cans like to go to a war.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
Like going to war. In fact, the cutters almost look
like medieval knights heading out to fight. They wear aluminum
guards in their hands, shins, and their knees like armor,
as well as heavy boots and their feet to protect
themselves from the razor sharp blade on the cane knife.
All the cutters have stories of injuries selfn remembers some
(32:06):
graphic moments. Be warned.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
One of my roommates. He get his finger cut off
clean drop on the ground.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
Selvin's roommate was screaming, trying to pick up the fingers
so it could be reattached.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
I said, man, I gotta be careful. I gotta be careful.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
But being really careful wasn't always enough, because.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
Yeah, when I was lining up to cut sugar cane
and the first tip, I may slice my finger almost
in two and it was burning like fire. I just
don't got my finger didn't fell off.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Selvin was rushed off the field finger bleeding, and.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
They must driver given to the doctor. They dishes back together.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Selvin says he didn't even have anesthetic during the stitches.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
It was burnt in like crazy. Was hurting so bad.
I feel like I'm almost dyeing. It was so painful,
And I don't get a cartline that in a life.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
Cuts were common and painful, but they weren't the worst
thing that could happen. Selvin remembers one guy with a
terrible leg injury.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
I don't know what's wrong with his leg. When you
look at his leg, he's get different color than the
other leg. You say he ain't got no life in
his leg. Tell you the truth. I don't know what
happened to that guy. They take him away. He never
come by, He just disappeared.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
In the eighties, there were an average of ten deaths
each year in the sugar cane industry. We repeatedly asked
the sugarcane farms and their trade groups to respond to
the claims about the living and working conditions on their farms.
In the eighties, and nineties, and the accusation that they
didn't allow journalists to talk to cutters. We got no response.
(34:02):
But all this wasn't new, you see, the sugar cane
industry has relied on people to cut cane by hand
for centuries. Before the seventeenth century, sugar was rare and
in Europe pretty much unheard of. When I say sugar,
I'm referring to the products made from the juice of
sugar cane. For millennia, humans almost never ate it. Something
(34:23):
we now eat daily and don't even think about. Only
really emerged in our diets like three hundred and fifty
years ago. As soon as it did become available, people
couldn't get enough of the sweet things It made, treats,
rum cubes to put in hot drinks. Within two centuries,
sugar became a part of everyday life for people in
Europe at least. And how did this happen well with
(34:47):
the colonization of the Americas and the enslavement of millions
of Africans. These delights that they enjoyed in Europe were
baked off the backs of men, women, and children who
were kidnapped in their home countries, shipped to the United
States and the Caribbean and forced to do the backbreaking
and deadly work of cutting sugarcane. Victor and Selvin's ancestors
(35:12):
were perhaps among them. There's a quote from a French
writer in the seventeen hundreds that expresses it well, I
do not know whether coffee and sugar are essential to
the happiness of Europe, but I do know for certain
that these two plants have been disastrous for two parts
of the world. America has been depopulated in order to
(35:34):
make space for them to grow. Africa is being depopulated
in order to get people to farm them. The Transatlantic
slave trade is one of the most horrific and bitter
chapters of human history. I'm sure hearing that the life
of an enslaved person working on a sugar plantation was
utterly inhumane won't surprise you. But maybe it's surprising to
(35:57):
think that your cake or cookie, or even and yogurt
is fundamentally linked to this shameful history, a history that
some people say continued all the way to the nineteen nineties.
And what I mean by that is the job Selvin
and Victor did on the farms in Florida. Some people
have called it modern day slavery.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
It is like a cousin to slavery.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
I would say, a cousin to slavery. And remember all
this is happening just miles away from glamour and the
glitter in West Palm Beach.
Speaker 8 (36:32):
It's enough to make your eyes pop out. All that luxury.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
It's incredible, a split screen reality, the difference between the
eye popping luxury of West Palm Beach and the brutal
conditions in the fields just an hour down the road. Look,
it's not unusual that the rich live alongside the poor,
but in this case it's extreme. It's not a wealth gap,
it's a canyon. And you know who else lives in
Palm Beach, the people who profit from the work that
(37:00):
Victor and Selvin are doing. I asked Victor if he'd
ever heard the name of the owner of the farm
he spent years working at. Did you ever hear the
name of the owners?
Speaker 3 (37:10):
Did you? No?
Speaker 2 (37:10):
No, no, no no.
Speaker 3 (37:12):
I never hear the owner.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Know, well, I know who owns the farm, and I've
also been to where they live and it's huge. I
mean it looks like a hotel.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
That's a big house.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
And I've seen their super yacht. It's massive. It looks
like a battleship. Right, It's easily bigger than my house.
Speaker 3 (37:33):
I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 4 (37:34):
This yacht was the one that Bill Clinton had spent.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
Time in.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
The owner of this yacht, the owners of these farms.
They were very mysterious to Victor and Selvin and to
me too before embarking on this podcast. But I'm on
a mission to reveal their power, which extends all the
way to the White House, to understand their riches, which
total in the billions, and to uncover their influence not
(38:02):
only on the cutters' lives, but on yours too. Stephanie
and Alec were interviewing cutters and observing their lives in
an attempt to show the world what was going on
in Florida, and what they'd heard had truly horrified them.
But even as they gained the trust of the workers,
one thing became abundantly clear. The sugar farm owners don't
(38:23):
want them stooping.
Speaker 6 (38:24):
Around everywhere you go. It says no trespassing, no trustpassing.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
Stephanie devised some surreptitious strategies for interviewing the cutters down
back roads or in abandoned barracks, and then she started
to notice she was being pulled over like a lot.
Speaker 6 (38:40):
How we became away that the police were monitoring us
was because they would stop us on the roads.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
Stephanie presumed that someone from one of the sugar companies
was giving her license plate numbers to the authorities. So
after getting pulled over again and again, I.
Speaker 6 (38:54):
Would have a rented car. And so what I would
do every two days is drive the two hours back
to West pom Beach where I rented the car and
switched the car, and then come back and then we'd have,
you know, a different car with different plates. The work
is thought that was like quite a music. I mean
they really like they didn't get it at all, Like
because every time I would drive up to the camp,
like we would come in a different car. They were
(39:15):
just like, how many cars.
Speaker 7 (39:16):
Do you have?
Speaker 1 (39:19):
Then one day, when she'd been secretly filming in one
of the barracks where the cutters were living.
Speaker 6 (39:24):
It was one afternoon that we came to film and
then we were just getting back in the car to leave,
and I accidentally lacked the keys in the car.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
Stephanie and her whole crew are stuck there. The camp
manager isn't away for long and the clock is ticking.
Speaker 6 (39:43):
So we were stuck outside the car, and then the
camp manager or white man drove up like, okay, are
we going to get out of this one?
Speaker 2 (39:51):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (39:51):
You know.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
They're standing there cameras in hand. I mean, it's got
to be pretty obvious what they're doing.
Speaker 6 (39:58):
And just as his car striving up, one of the
king cutters came out of the barrack with a blanket,
put it over the camera, and swiftly under his arm,
carried it into the barracks. The camp manager presumed that
we were working girls and explained to us, you know,
after we were done here, we should come see him.
(40:21):
And then the men brought out the camera and brought
out a hanger and helped us break into the car
and leave.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
This story is part of a pattern that's becoming more
and more pronounced as our team investigates the sugar industry.
How far the managers and the sugar companies will go
to maintain secrecy to avoid outside oversight and dodge questions.
And anytime you try to prevent journalists from seeing what
you're doing, it makes us suspicious. Both Stephanie and Alec
(40:53):
persevered for months, kept digging. Eventually they came to get
a feel for the routines and the lives of the cutters.
Speaker 6 (41:01):
The life force in the barracks is strong and beautiful
in a way because it's home, cooking one's own food,
you know, listening to the music, writing letters, home playing
Domino's tailors would be sewing. You know, you'd see them
and doing as much as they can to make themselves comfortable.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
The sugarcane season lasts from around late October to mid March,
so the Cutters were in America for around six months,
and often they'd come back year after year. Imagine being
away from your friends and family for such long stretches
of time.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
Yeah, I missed them. I've not seen them, but I
still feel good at working some money so I could
better my life and dear life.
Speaker 4 (41:43):
They were all suffering to be there. They'd left behind families,
some of them they left behind girlfriends, some of them
with no idea whether or not their wives and girlfriends
were being faithful to them.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
They'd keep in touch by writing letters, often waiting two
weeks for a response. We managed to get our hands
on some that people we'd interviewed had kept. One man
wrote to his mother, how keeping, I hope you are fine.
I just write these few lines to let you know
that I reached safe. The plane ride was very exciting
for me. We landed at West Palm Beach at ten
(42:15):
twenty pm. At the camp, it was exciting for me
because life there is like a boarding school, and it
was my first experience. Each morning, breakfast starts serving at
four am, lunch at ten am, dinner at four pm.
But because of hard work, that amount of food can't
keep us, so you got to buy groceries for yourself
so that you can eat extra. The work is very hard,
(42:36):
but I'm going to stick with it because i'd like
to take back some nice things for you and for
my brothers and sisters. Dear mother, I'm hoping that you
all did have a wonderful Christmas. I'm so sorry I
couldn't be at home with you all, but I'm trying
to work and achieve some things. The conditions here it's
really rough. So Mom, here, I send you this small's
(42:57):
money to help with the light bill. Please don't laugh it.
So give my kind of regards to the entire family
and let them know I miss them. But I am
just continuing the days left because I know the crop
will soon be over. I will try again next season,
your big son John. Stephanie actually included some of these
(43:17):
letters and the responses from their wives in her documentary.
Speaker 12 (43:21):
Hello Ovin, good day to you. Hope you're fine. I've
received your letter, and I also received the money, and
I was grateful for it. My mother help me on
the farm while you're away, and sometimes she sleep with me.
Whenever I miss you and my mind runs on you,
I just take up the picture and look at it,
(43:43):
and it reminds me of you.
Speaker 3 (43:46):
When you get that letter from your wife, it's like Christmas. Man,
I tell you feel good and nice. You're here for
your family at home. I know that it am I right.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
And speaking of Christmas, Victor spent twelve years cutting cane,
which also meant twelve holiday seasons separated from his family
by hundreds of miles and vast expanses of water. To
keep close, Victor would send his wife festive love letters,
but he's not that eager to give us details.
Speaker 3 (44:14):
No no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no go there. You were supposed
to a love words, so you shouldn't better ask me that.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
We'll leave the love words to your imagination. Independently, but
almost in tandem, Alec and Stephanie began to get to
the bottom of some of the mysteries. What the lives
of these cutters were like, where they were living, the
reality of the job they were doing. But like the
cane smoke obscuring the air, there was still the fog
of one question surrounding them. Beyond the terrible living standards
(44:50):
and the horrific injuries, there was something else which would
make this a story worth telling.
Speaker 4 (44:55):
I had always heard that the cutters were discontent about
them out of money they were paid. The amount they
were paid didn't seem to correspond in any discernible way
to the work they were doing.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
We know when the cane cutters arrived in a field
each morning they were told how much they would get
for cutting a row of sugar cane. But we also
know that this amount would often change. Imagine one day
you cut a row and earn forty dollars, but the
next day, for a similar row, you're told you'll get
just twenty dollars. You don't know what's going on. It
seems almost random and unfair. One worker told Stephanie.
Speaker 9 (45:35):
I always be the hard work, you know. That's how
I've even known from them. Throwing out a hard work
doesn't really bot of me, is just to get paid
what Sometime it doesn't work that way.
Speaker 1 (45:49):
Another worker showed Stephanie his pacelip. He got injured and
couldn't work all the time. But the food and board
isn't free for the workers. They have to pay to
live in the barracks and for the food they were supplied,
which by all accounts was far from gourmet. So this
guy couldn't work and he was still charged. At the
end of the two weeks, he'd earned just ten dollars.
(46:12):
This whole issue of how much the cutters were getting
paid was really confusing to everyone.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
I really thought I would be getting more money when
I paid what they was giving us. Sometime I worked
twenty dollars for a day, dollars for the day, eighteen
dollars a day. But I need Jamaica far coming to
work so hard that his a little bit of money.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
Victor says that there was no recourse if you complained,
no one listened, or they threatened to send you back home.
Speaker 3 (46:43):
Ye would ask no question. Nobody wanted to appay you
no mind, you work your like sleeve. You work your
like sleeve.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
Alex started sniffing around and the reaction he got from
the sugar industry made him think he might be onto something.
Speaker 4 (46:59):
The one question you would never get an answer to.
The response to asking how are the cutters paid would
either be a cheerful kind of oh, it's too complicated
to explain, to a kind of I think our interviews
over now. It was another one of those you will
never find this out challenges. Priority number one for me
was trying to understand the lives of the cutters, and
(47:21):
one a was sort of, well, I do need to
figure out how these guys are paid. And it was
a huge secret in the industry. It was possibly the
most closely guarded secret that the industry had.
Speaker 1 (47:36):
This payment question is the driving force behind much of
what was to come. It would be a catalyst, a
catalyst that would launch a landmark court case, a legal
battle with unintended consequences for the lives of these cutters,
the city of Belglade, and the whole sugar industry. Next time,
how is this even possible legally? How a group of
(48:00):
lawyers decided to get to the bottom of this payment puzzle.
Speaker 2 (48:03):
An insanely complicated system to figure out from scratch.
Speaker 1 (48:09):
How they came up with a theory and gathered their
evidence was that a little like a smoking gun, uh yeah,
and decided to take on a powerful, relentless and protective industry.
Speaker 7 (48:21):
If they were right, then these workers were owed tens
of millions of dollars next to wages.
Speaker 1 (48:26):
That's next time on Big Sugar. Big Sugar is produced
by Imagine Audio, Weekday Fund Productions and Novel for iHeartMedia.
The series is hosted by me Celeste Henley. Big Sugar
is produced by Jeff Eisenman at Weekday Fund Productions. It's
(48:48):
executive produced by Karl Welker, Nathan Kloke, and Marie Brenner.
Story editor and executive producer is Joe Wheeler. The researcher
is na Aya Metti. Production management from Scherie Houston, Frankie Taylor,
and Charlotte Wolfe. Our fact checker is Sona Avakian. Field
reporting by Amber Amortige and Peter Hayden. Sound design and
(49:11):
mixing by Eli Block, Naomi Clark, and Daniel Kempsen. Original
music composed by Troy McCubbin at Alloy tracks, additional music
by Nicholas Alexander. Special thanks to Alec Wilkinson, author of
the book Big Sugar, and Stephanie Black, director of the
documentary H two Worker. Big Sugar is based on the
(49:32):
Vanity Fair article in the Kingdom of Big Sugar by
Marie Branner
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