"These Sugar Barons Built and $8 Billion Fortune With Washington's Help" is the headline over a pretty good Bloomberg News article outlining the Fanjul family's business: "it's held up by a quota system that restricts imports to give producers some 85 percent of U.S. sales, and by a federal loan program that, basically, puts a floor under prices." The result is higher prices for consumers.
As is often but not always the case, government interference in the free market winds up helping politically influential very rich people and making them even richer, while hurting the average person buying sugar (or something else) at the supermarket. Journalists have been writing one version or another of this same story about the Fanjul family for years (here is a nearly identical version that appeared in Time magazine in 1998, nearly 20 years ago), and it never seems to change.