{"id":238858,"date":"2021-05-13T12:59:42","date_gmt":"2021-05-13T16:59:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=238858"},"modified":"2021-05-13T12:59:42","modified_gmt":"2021-05-13T16:59:42","slug":"powerful-cuban-american-businessmen-sued-for-allegedly-marketing-cuban-sugar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/cuba-usa\/powerful-cuban-american-businessmen-sued-for-allegedly-marketing-cuban-sugar\/","title":{"rendered":"Powerful Cuban-American businessmen sued for allegedly marketing Cuban sugar"},"content":{"rendered":"

A <\/span>Cuban-American<\/span><\/a> family, dedicated for more than a century to the sugar industry and whose properties were nationalized on the island in the 1960s, has been sued in a Miami court for allegedly negotiating with the Cuban government the purchase and transfer to the United Kingdom of a shipment of sugar, produced on another property that was also confiscated.<\/span><\/p>\n

The <\/span>Alfonso and Jos\u00e9 Fanjul<\/span><\/a> brothers, millionaire owners of the Florida Crystals refinery, based in Palm Beach County, were sued by the Francisco Sugar Company, a company founded in 1899 in New Jersey, whose owners are also of Cuban origin and whose farmland in the Guayabal area, in eastern Cuba, were nationalized after the triumph of the revolution led by Fidel Castro.<\/span><\/p>\n

The complaint is directed against ASR Group International Inc., the Fanjul conglomerate, the world\u2019s largest sugar refinery and marketer, and was filed under the <\/span>Helms-Burton Act<\/span><\/a>, whose controversial titles III and IV were activated by former President Donald Trump on May 5, 2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

The law allows lawsuits in U.S. courts by Americans and Cuban Americans who want to file a lawsuit against the use by other companies of assets nationalized at the beginning of the Cuban Revolution.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to the text of the lawsuit, the Fanjul company violated the Helms-Burton Act by buying cane sugar grown on the former lands of Francisco Sugar Company and exporting that sugar from the Port of Guayabal to the ASR refinery in London. The document specifies that \u201cit trafficked that sugar with full knowledge that the sugar lands of Francisco and the Port of Guayabal had been confiscated by the Cuban government in 1960.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The complaint also indicates that at the time of the nationalization of the lands, the company had yet to fulfill nearly 47 years of exploitation rights, granted by the government of dictator Fulgencio Batista, starting in 1951. In other words, at the moment of the filing of the complaint in the Miami court, those concession rights, beyond the moment the properties were nationalized, would already be expired. This is a no less important detail, because two other lawsuits for the confiscation of properties in ports on the island have been rejected precisely because they were already expired concessions.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lawsuit against Amazon under Helms-Burton Act dismissed<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n