My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 96

While Creative Time’s website includes
a compelling essay written by the
narrator of a documentary about the
forced and child labor that constitute
modern slavery, it doesn’t name the
mega-corporation that owns Central
Romano, the plantation on which it
was filmed: Flo-Sun, of which Domino
is its best-known subsidiary. If the
people at Creative Time, along with
Walker, have seen this film — as indeed
they must have in their research — I
wonder how they feel about the ironic
possibility that Walker’s sculpture
might have been enabled by slave labor.

Carol Diehl is an artist, critic (Contributing Editor, Art in
America), and former performance poet (Nuyorican Poets
Cafe), based in New York. This article originally appeared
on her blog, Art Vent.

Essential reading includes the Vanity
Fair article, “In the Kingdom of
Big Sugar,” which inspired the two
documentaries, a cnn documentary
on how the Fanjuls could be the
“First Family of Corporate Welfare,”
and another on their strong- arm tactics
with lawmakers, from Wikileaks.
You could spend days, as I did,
reading about the moral and ethical
transgressions of the Fanjuls, and just
when you think it couldn’t get worse,
it does: In 2010, the New York Post’s
Page Six reported that Pepe Fanjul’s
executive assistant of 35 years is the
ex-wife of former kkk leader David
Duke, and the current wife of Don
Black, a former kkk grand wizard and
member of the American Nazi Party.
He now runs white-supremacist
Web site StormFront.org. A company
representative said, “While we may
not agree with someone’s politics,
we wouldn’t terminate them for that….
We will not discriminate against
anybody…”

One could also make an issue of the
extensive advertising Walker is providing
for another sponsor, Two Trees
Management, owned by Creative Time
board member Jed Walentas, who
worked for Trump before taking over
his father’s real estate business, and will
have 1700 luxury apartments to sell
in his massive waterfront development
on the site (as well as 700 “affordable”
units, the number bumped up under
pressure from Mayor de Blasio).
And then there’s the non-renewable
polystyrene that went into this gigantic
temporary work that, like Styrofoam,
could take a million years to break
down. However next to the question
of how the 80 tons of Fanjul sugar
were most likely sourced, these are
mere quibbles.
So much for institutionalized protest —
this is art packaged to look like
radicalism while supporting capitalism
at its worst.
Next: “Occupy!” (The Musical),
brought to you by Citibank.

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

In the Dominican Republic, the Fanjuls
have been subject to repeated allegations
of labor exploitation, particularly of
undocumented Haitian migrant workers
with little to no legal standing before
Dominican government institutions.
The U.S. Department of Labor includes
sugar from the Dominican Republic—
much of which comes from Fanjulowned plantations or is imported to
Fanjul-owned refineries — on its
annual “List of Goods Produced by
child and Forced Labor” Both a 2005
Canadian Broadcasting Documentary
[“The Price of Sugar,” narrated by
Paul Newman, and the 2007 film
“The Sugar Babies” narrated by Haitian
writer Edwidge Danticat [author of the
Creative Time essay] call attention to
the working conditions of impoverished
cane-cutters laboring at the Fanjuls’
Central Romana. In the United States,
meanwhile, opponents of u.s.
agricultural subsidies and government
protections have long criticized the
Fanjuls for building their dominance in
the domestic market on the backs
of artificially inflated prices and the
u.s. taxpayer….

I lifted this mission statement from Creative Time’s
Wikipedia entry, well aware that it is not same statement
that appears on their website. However having been
Director of Public Relations (a somewhat hilarious title,
given that I was the entire department) for Creative Time
in the mid-80s, when it was a pioneering organization
and very true to its nonprofit status, these were the
words I used to promote it and feel best represent the
inspired vision of founder Anita Contini.

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Pepy and Alfy Fanjul who run Flo-Sun,
inherited the sugar empire from their
Cuban father. Dubbed “the Koch
brothers of Southern Florida,” they‘re
said to be friends and neighbors of
the Kochs who, in comparison with
the sugar barons, look like Mother
Theresa clones.

NOTE: