Alfonso Fanjul Jr.

Alfonso Fanjul Jr. was born in Havana on 27 June 1937 into sugar aristocracy. His parents' marriage united the Fanjul and Gomez-Mena fortunes: mills, cane land, Havana real estate including the Manzana de Gomez, and a social world centered on clubs and harvest seasons. He was educated for leadership of that world, including study at Fordham University in New York, and returned to Cuba as the Batista regime collapsed. Within months the family's Cuban assets were gone.

Fanjul attended Fordham University in New York. In May 2010 Fordham awarded him an honorary doctorate, recognizing both his business career and his lifelong tie to the university. He remained proud of the Jesuit education that framed his English-language and American professional life after exile.

In 1960 Alfy, his father, and Pepe Gomez-Mena founded the Florida operations that became Florida Crystals. Starting with a few thousand acres and relocated Louisiana mills near Lake Okeechobee, they expanded across the Everglades Agricultural Area. Alfy became chairman and CEO in 1980. The 1984 Gulf and Western purchase added Florida and Dominican scale, including Central Romana and Casa de Campo. Vertical integration through refining and marketing produced ASR Group brands such as Domino and C&H. The company also built a large biomass power plant at Okeelanta and pioneered organic cane sugar grown and milled in Florida.

Alfy married Maria Cristina de los Reyes; they later divorced. In 2007 he married Raysa Herrera. He had two daughters, Crista Ryan and Lillian Fernandez, and a stepdaughter, Raissa Enis, plus grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He lived a Palm Beach life of fishing, golf (including a 1982 Bing Crosby National Pro-Am win), and yachting, while keeping ritual visits to the Glades mills each harvest. Faith mattered: he was a regular Mass-goer and patron connected to the Diocese of Palm Beach.

Exile taught him to treat political access as survival. He backed Democrats (including Clinton's 1992 Florida effort) while his brother Pepe backed Republicans, a hedging strategy later noted by critics of sugar subsidies. He described a hierarchy of duty to workers, community, and shareholders, and claimed an environmental conscience even as Everglades advocates sued and protested cane agriculture. On Cuba he loved the island of his birth yet invested his life's work in the United States, resisting his father's late obsession with return until, in 2014, he briefly floated conditional openness to Cuban business.

The Fanjul companies drew sustained criticism over U.S. sugar import quotas and price supports, Everglades pollution from cane agriculture, and labor conditions in the Dominican Republic associated with Central Romana. Free-market groups called American Big Sugar a cartel. Documentary filmmakers and journalists highlighted Haitian and Dominican cane cutters' conditions. The family and company denied wrongdoing, stressed American jobs and regenerative initiatives, and operated through public-relations channels more often than open interviews. Alfy's rare Vanity Fair sit-down remained a primary public window into his manner and motives.

With Pepe he was inducted into the Florida Agricultural Hall of Fame in 2018. Fordham University gave him an honorary doctorate in 2010. Civic and farm groups in western Palm Beach County repeatedly honored the family for Glades employment and New Hope Charities work. Sporting titles included the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am (1982) and Gold Cup fishing victories (1979, 2007).

Alfy Fanjul's legacy is the modern Florida Crystals and ASR sugar complex: Domino boxes on grocery shelves, Glades mill towns, Dominican resort tourism at Casa de Campo, and a template for exile capital remaking U.S. agribusiness. Admirers cite immigrant grit and community philanthropy. Detractors cite subsidies, wetlands, and labor. Both sides agree he was the patriarch who held the American Fanjul enterprise together after 1980. Bill Clinton and Nancy Pelosi's presence at his Palm Beach funeral underscored how thoroughly sugar and politics had intertwined in his lifetime.

Marie Brenner's Vanity Fair portrait 'In the Kingdom of Big Sugar' remains the most cited long-form profile. Carl Hiaasen parodied Cuban sugar brothers in the novel Strip Tease. Jamie Johnson's documentary The One Percent and films such as The Sugar Babies examined cane labor connected to Fanjul holdings. BBC's Inside Claridge's showed Alfy as a luxury-hotel regular. Corporate videos and Florida farm-bureau tributes recorded Hall of Fame and harvest honors.

Alfonso Fanjul Jr. died on 3 August 2026 in South Florida at 89. Florida Crystals said he died peacefully with family present and did not publish a cause. A funeral Mass followed on 8 August at the Basilica of St. Edward in Palm Beach, with burial arrangements reported through local notices. Political and business figures across parties offered condolences.