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Bill Haney's devastating documentary, The Price of
Sugar, explores the plight of migrant Haitian sugar cane
cutters in a hostile neighboring Dominican Republic. Cutting
cane at gunpoint and virtual prisoners in barbed wire concentration
camps, these sugar slaves are starved, beaten, disappeared,
malnourished, riddled with internal parasites and lacking
in decent housing and uncontaminated drinking water, even
ironically as other far more privileged foreigners frolic
in the waters of the tropical tourist paradise nearby.***
The Price of Sugar is the story of these exploited
and abused Haitian workers, and also the story of defiant
Spanish rebel priest, Father Christopher Hartley, and his
struggle in the face of death threats to champion the union
rights and human rights of these terrorized migrant workers.
Narrated by Paul Newman, this is a scathing yet inspiring
documentary about these enslaved men, women and even children
toiling on plantations owned by ruthless sugar cartels who
also control media and banking interests in the country.***
Numbering in the tens of thousands, the Haitians are
stripped of any personal documents so that they're unable
to leave the plantations without being subject to arrest.
Many are not even allowed to return to Haiti after the harvest,
because the sugar companies find it substantially cost effective
to detain them permanently, rather than transporting them
back and forth illegally across the border between the two
countries.***
A really significant issues that comes to the forefront
in The Price Of Sugar, is just how the light skinned elite
that controls the sugar industry, has managed so effectively
to turn Dominicans against Haitians, when both are poor,
workingclass and with shared African roots. With substandard
conditions of existence for all to go around, in addition
to sugar corporation control of divisive propaganda through
the corporate media, setting these two impoverished cultures
against one another rather than confronting the source of
their shared misery, effectively enables this unfortunate
process.***
Father Hartley succeeded in gaining some minimal improvements
for these people, mobilizing the Haitians themselves to
agitate for a few basic union rights, humane housing, food
and some health care. But he has since been ordered back
to Spain by the Catholic Church. Which, strangely enough,
seems to consider struggling to defend the poor against
exploitation and oppression far more of a Church scandal
than say, pedophilia.***
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