"Se fue pa' la azúcar": Film Review of The Price of Sugar and The Sugar Babies

These two powerful documentaries—The Price of Sugar and Sugar Babies: The Plight of the Children of Agricultural Workers in the Dominican Republic—very effectively expose the deplorable conditions faced by Haitian sugar cane workers today in the Dominican Republic. Haitians replaced British West Indians as the central labor source for the sugar industry in the Dominican Republic in the 1920s. Sugar plantation agriculture expanded rapidly as a result of U.S. capital investment in the 1880s and for much of the twentieth century was the central pillar of the Dominican economy. Originally these workers were employees of U.S. firms, which actually developed the contract labor system through which these importees were solicited and transported. Chronically malnourished, living frequently without potable water or adequate health care and paid miserable piece-work wages of frequently less than two dollars a day—much of which is spent purchasing overpriced food at the company store—these conditions became the subject of international human rights concerns attracting journalistic outcries in the early 1980s and more direct intervention recently as concerns over global human trafficking have grown. For one, at the United Nations, the London-based Anti-Slavery society denounced allegations that Haitians were forcibly sold to sugar enterprises, padlocked in barracks at night, and clear only a few dollars after the harvest. The prominent role of the Dominican army in facilitating the movement of Haitians to the bateyes and keeping them there helped give rise to a debate over whether Haitian cane cutters in the Dominican sugar sector should be rightfully termed slaves or not.²

These two films do not just document these political struggles and provide the perspective of Haitian workers themselves; they have themselves become ammunition in a war of positions with significant legal repercussions. Indeed, Dominican sugar barons, the Vicini corporation, filed suit in U.S. district court in Boston against filmmaker Haney for presenting misleading material, forcing him to spend some $50,000 in legal protection—a travesty since the film was made on a shoestring budget. And Haitian human rights activist Christopher Hartley—a central protagonist in both films—has since been transferred out of the Dominican cane fields by the Catholic Church (Piccalo 2007).

The Price of Sugar thus chronicles a key battlefield in the struggle to raise the issue of human rights violations for Haitian sugar workers in the Dominican Republic. There are approximately one million Haitians living in the Dominican Republic, and sugar cane cutters suffer extremely impoverished conditions and isolation in the bateyes where Haitians are housed. Resembling slave barracks, these dormitories were originally designed for single men, although today these dwellings are often home to families of up to seven people. The film treats a plantation run by the privately-owned Vicini corporation, a venerable family which entered the Dominican sugar industry in the late nineteenth century during its rapid expansion, developing the largest private sugar firm in the nation from what was originally just two plantations in 1893 when Juan Bautista Vicini first arrived in the Dominican Republic from Italy (he later served as president during the 1920s). Over time the Vicini's built up a family-based conglomerate which expanded into banking and the media to form one of the largest sugar corporations of the Caribbean, its singular economic position in the country developed through its astute ability to play ball with a wide variety of political regimes, from the strongman rule of Ulises Heureaux (1887-99, whom Vicini came to know as his chief money-lender) to the U.S. Marine government during the occupation (1916-24). It is important to note that today, king sugar is but a shadow of its former self, however. The Vicini enterprise is the last remaining private stronghold in an industry that over centuries gave shape to modern Caribbean nations but today is in...