The Super Bowl halftime show featured Bad Bunny surrounded by sugar cane, towering stalks that framed his performance like set decoration. Like cultural pride. Like celebration.
And for many viewers, that’s exactly what it was: a visual nod to Puerto Rican agriculture, to Caribbean identity, to roots.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about what else sugar cane represents.
What it has always represented.
What it cost. Who paid. And how America has spent centuries making sure we forget.
Domino Sugar sits in American kitchens like it’s always belonged there; poured into coffee, folded into birthday cakes, sprinkled over Sunday desserts. A brand so normal, so household, so harmless looking, it never invites suspicion.
It should. But sugar has never been innocent.
And Domino Sugar, one of the most recognizable sugar companies in American history, did not rise on sweetness. It rose on exploitation. On forced labor. On stolen land. On Black suffering, rebranded as convenience.
Domino is not just a product. It is the polished continuation of slavery’s supply chain. Because the truth is this: the sugar empire wasn’t built on cane. It was built on Black bodies.
Sugar Was Never Just a Crop. It Was a System.
If you want to understand Domino Sugar, you have to understand sugar itself. Sugar was not simply harvested. It was extracted, through violence, through colonial domination, through labor systems designed to grind human beings down until they broke.
The New York Times called it what it was: “the barbaric history of sugar in America.” That phrase isn’t poetic. It’s accurate.
Sugar didn’t just fuel economies. It fueled empires. And the people who paid for it weren’t the ones who profited.
From the Caribbean to Louisiana, sugar plantations were some of the most brutal sites of slavery in the Western world. The work was relentless. The heat was punishing. The equipment was deadly. The mills crushed hands and limbs. The boiling houses cooked workers alive. The fields demanded speed and endurance until collapse.
And unlike cotton, sugar required constant production. Cane had to be cut fast. It had to be crushed quickly. It had to be processed immediately.
There were no breaks. No mercy. And certainly no freedom.
Domino’s Roots: A Fortune Built in the Shadow of Slavery
Domino Sugar traces directly back to the Havemeyer family and the American Sugar Refining Company, founded in 1887. On paper, it looks like American industrial success: business growth, innovation, refinement, modernization.
But the foundation was rotten. The Havemeyer empire was built on cheap sugar; sugar produced by enslaved Africans across the Caribbean and in slave-dependent economies like Cuba, where slavery remained legal until 1886.
Let that sink in.
Domino’s monopoly emerged at the exact moment slavery “ended” in the U.S., while the global sugar trade was still being powered by bondage elsewhere. The chains were simply relocated.
And even after U.S. emancipation, the labor systems feeding sugar production did not become humane. They simply changed names.
After Emancipation: Debt Peonage Was Slavery with Better PR
After 1865, America didn’t abandon forced labor. It simply rebranded it.
In the post-emancipation South, especially Louisiana, formerly enslaved families were trapped in systems of sharecropping and debt peonage. They were technically “free,” but functionally imprisoned by contracts designed to ensure they could never get ahead.
Wages were devoured by charges for transportation, lodging, equipment, food, and “supplies.” Families were kept in perpetual debt, and leaving could mean violence, arrest, or death.
The chains weren’t always iron anymore. Sometimes they were financial. Sometimes they were legal. Sometimes they were generational. But the effect was the same: Black labor extracted for white profit.
And sugar companies like Domino benefited from this system, because it ensured the price of cane stayed low, cheap enough to fuel monopolies and industrial growth.
The Williamsburg Refinery: Refining Cane, Refining Cruelty
One of the most famous Domino-associated refineries stood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, beginning in the mid-1800s. While it processed raw sugar into clean white crystals for American consumption, the source material came from cane fields where Black labor was treated as disposable.
Solomon Northup, in Twelve Years a Slave, described the sugar plantation system as unrelenting, “no distinction as to days of the week.” The grinding mills ran constantly. The work was day-and-night. The punishment was immediate. The injuries were routine.
Sugar was not harvested like food. It was harvested like warfare.
And while enslaved people bled in the fields, refineries like Williamsburg made that suffering look civilized, turning brutality into something you could spoon into a teacup.
That is the genius of industrial America. It doesn’t erase violence. It packages it.
The Monopoly: When Domino Controlled America’s Sweet Tooth
By the early 1900s, the American Sugar Refining Company controlled a staggering share of the U.S. sugar refining market, estimates range from 85–98% between 1887–1910, with the company facing antitrust litigation in 1910 for monopolistic practices.
That kind of power is not an accident. Monopolies are built through domination, not innovation. They are built through acquisition, intimidation, and control over supply chains.
Domino didn’t simply compete. It consumed.
And once the U.S. market was locked down, the sugar empire expanded outward, into Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and other Caribbean territories where colonial governments made land theft easy and labor exploitation even easier.
Colonial Expansion: Sugar and the Burning of Villages
Puerto Rico became a sugar prize after the U.S. seized it in 1898. Soon, U.S.-linked sugar interests expanded aggressively, pushing out local farmers and consolidating land into massive plantations.
In some cases, companies reportedly destroyed villages and displaced residents to acquire acreage.
This wasn’t business, it was conquest. And it followed the same pattern slavery always followed: remove the people from the land, then force the remaining people to work it.
The sugar economy did not uplift the colonized, it extracted them.
The Super Bowl’s Sugar Cane: Celebration or Amnesia?
When Bad Bunny performed at Super Bowl LIX surrounded by sugar cane, the imagery was intentional. It was meant to honor Puerto Rican heritage, to celebrate Caribbean culture on one of America’s biggest stages.
And it did that. But it also did something else, something America does constantly, brilliantly, reflexively: It sanitized the symbol while erasing the system.
Because sugar cane isn’t neutral. It never has been. In Puerto Rico, in the Dominican Republic, across the entire Caribbean, sugar cane doesn’t just represent agriculture. It represents colonial extraction. It represents the U.S. corporations that seized Puerto Rican land after 1898 and turned the island into a sugar factory. It represents the Domino empire that expanded into Caribbean territories precisely because colonial governments made exploitation profitable and resistance illegal.
The Super Bowl halftime show placed sugar cane at the center of American entertainment, the most watched cultural moment of the year, and asked us to see it as beautiful.
And it is beautiful, until you remember what it means. Until you remember who cut it. Until you remember that the same sugar industry Bad Bunny’s performance honored is still being investigated for forced labor practices in the Dominican Republic, right now, in 2025, while America cheers.
This is what America does best: it takes symbols of violence and repackages them as nostalgia. As pride. As tradition. As halftime entertainment.
And we consume it without question, just like we consume Domino Sugar without thinking about where it came from.
The Chalmette Connection: Louisiana’s Sugar, Louisiana’s Blood
And then there’s Louisiana, because of course Louisiana is in this story.
Domino’s Chalmette refinery, established in the early 1900s, sits within a region shaped by the sugar economy and its violence. Louisiana sugar wealth is inseparable from the brutal labor history of the state.
Even beyond plantations, Louisiana carries the legacy of racial terror tied to labor resistance.
The Thibodaux Massacre of 1887, where Black sugar workers striking for fair wages were murdered in mass numbers, was not an isolated event. It was a message.
Between 35 and 300 Black workers (estimates vary, because their lives weren’t considered worth counting precisely) were killed by white militias and local law enforcement. They had been striking for higher wages, asking for $1.25 per day instead of $1.00. They were demanding to be paid for Sunday work. They wanted their labor treated as valuable.
The sugar industry’s response was execution. It was the South telling Black laborers: You can be “free,” but you will not be equal. And you will not disrupt the economy we built on your suffering.
Sugar didn’t just exploit Black labor, it policed it. With guns.
Modern Slavery: Domino’s Supply Chain Didn’t Evolve. It Expanded.
People like to believe slavery ended. They like to believe brutality is historical. But exploitation didn’t disappear. It globalized.
Domino has long sourced sugar through Caribbean producers, including Central Romana in the Dominican Republic, an operation repeatedly accused of labor abuses involving Haitian migrant workers.
These workers have been described as living in poverty conditions, denied adequate healthcare, paid wages that trap them in cycles of survival, and subjected to conditions human rights groups have called “modern slavery.” Human Rights Watch and the International Labor Rights Forum have documented these conditions across multiple reports since the 1990s.
And in 2023, the U.S. issued an import ban connected to forced labor allegations in Dominican sugar production, specifically targeting Central Romana Corporation, one of the largest suppliers in Domino’s network.
That should have been headline news, it wasn’t. Because America is used to Black suffering being invisible, especially when it comes wrapped in a familiar label.
Domino Sugar doesn’t just represent American history, it represents America’s refusal to learn from it.
The Sweet Lie We Keep Swallowing
This is the part nobody wants to confront: Domino Sugar is not an outlier. It is a case study. It is what happens when slavery becomes “industry.” When colonialism becomes “commerce.” When forced labor becomes “supply chain.”
When suffering becomes profitable enough to survive centuries. We are not just consuming sugar. We are consuming a legacy. A refined version of exploitation that still depends on who is seen as disposable.
And the most disturbing part? Domino’s success depends on the same American habit that allowed slavery to thrive in the first place: Distance.
If you don’t see the cane field, you don’t feel the whip. If you don’t see the refinery labor, you don’t feel the exhaustion. If you don’t see the Haitian worker in the batey, you don’t feel the hunger.
You just see the crystals. You just taste the sweetness.
What Do We Do With This Truth?
We, collectively, need to recognize that America’s economy didn’t grow out of thin air, it grew out of coerced labor systems that were never dismantled, only renamed.
And if you’re in New Orleans, in Louisiana, in the Gulf South, this history isn’t distant, it is local. It is embedded in the soil, in the refineries, in the generational wealth gaps, and in the fact that the descendants of sugar’s victims are still fighting to survive in the same state that profited off their ancestors’ pain.
Domino Sugar is a symbol of America’s favorite trick: Make oppression profitable. Then make it invisible. Then sell it back to the public as normal.
Sugar’s sweet lie is that it’s harmless. But Domino’s story proves what many of us already know: Some of America’s most beloved brands were built on blood. And they stayed beloved because the blood was never shown.
Domino Sugar is what slavery looks like when it gets a marketing department. And America is still buying what they’re selling, one spoonful at a time.
Ani Catherine is a guest writer for Evans Cutchmore, writing at the intersection of power, memory, and institutional authority. Her work exists where power is exposed rather than explained, resisting simplification, polite consensus, and inherited narratives left uninterrogated.
Her essays move through history, identity, grief, and structural control, examining what gets preserved, what gets erased, and who benefits from the distinction. This work is intentionally unfiltered. Some pieces unsettle. Others linger. All are written with the understanding that language is never neutral, memory is never accidental, and silence is often policy.
Read at your own risk. This is not a soft place to land.
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