Haiti readies for the Gold Cup
The Caribbean nation is obsessed with soccer and hopes its national team can make it out of the first round of the Gold Cup tournament. Its under-17 team gets first invitation to play in FIFA World Cup.
1:58 PM PDT, June 5, 2007
MIAMI — It's late on a Sunday afternoon, the skies are slate gray with the threat of another violent South Florida rainstorm and the field is more gravel than grass. Yet the aluminum grandstands at Florida International University will soon be packed with more than 10,000 soccer fans wearing T-shirts, jackets and bandanas in the familiar blue and red of the Haitian flag.
The match is just a "friendly" between teams from neighboring churches in Miami's burgeoning Haitian community. And the level of play is spotty at best. But none of that seems to matter.
"For the Haitian people, soccer is a religion by itself," says a fan who identifies himself as Pastor Boul, the Creole word for ball. "It's the only thing that gathers everyone together."
And few people are more in need of unity than Haiti's. Wracked by decades of poverty, crushing unemployment and bloody street violence, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere — one termed "a failed state" by the United Nations — is long overdue for a little good news. Which is where Haiti's national soccer program comes in.
In January Haiti stunned Trinidad and Tobago to win the Caribbean Cup for the first time in its history. That also qualified Haiti's team for the CONCACAF Gold Cup, where it begins play Wednesday against Guadeloupe in Miami's Orange Bowl before what organizers expect will be a large and raucous pro-Haitian crowd.
The United States and Mexico are overwhelming favorites in the Gold Cup, although Haiti is seen has having a chance to reach the quarterfinals. Within the Caribbean soccer community, Haiti has long been ranked behind Trinidad and Tobago — which played in the 2006 World Cup — and Jamaica, which last appeared in the World Cup in 1998.
Still, if Haiti advanced to the Gold Cup's quarterfinals, it would mark a successful showing for a country that made its only appearance in the World Cup in 1974.
"In every country you have to have something that can bring people joy," says Jamil Jean Jacques, a midfielder on the Haitian national team. "If we win the Gold Cup, I think a lot of things are going to change. People are going to enjoy it.
"The president couldn't bring the Haitian people joy. Soccer. That's the only [thing] that can bring the Haitian people satisfaction."
Jacques knows firsthand about the transformative powers of soccer. Three years ago his father was killed in a street clash in Haiti.
"It was because of the violence," he says, using the catch-all phrase many Haitians employ to describe the years of terror inspired by street thugs and kidnappers, whose grip on the country is only now beginning to loosen. Instead Jacques and his brother, Bitielo, have taken their silent anger out on the soccer field with Jamil carrying the national team into the Gold Cup and Bitielo helping the junior team earn its first-ever invitation to the FIFA U-17 World Cup this summer.
"The violence in Haiti is really bad right now," Jacques said. "But we players, we know the need to let the Haitian people forget about violence for a moment. Right now the violence has slowed down because they know Haiti is going to play [for] the Gold Cup."
Stephane Guillaume, a national team defender, agrees. "In Haiti, there's a lot of problems that only soccer can solve ... because they love that," he says. "When soccer's being played, the Haitian people forget about everything."
Even the kidnappers take a break.
"Kidnapping has become an industry where those guys are making money off of that," says Jacques Fitzgerald Lemoine, who fled Haiti as a teenager but returns frequently to visit family. "But when Haiti is playing soccer, those guys are Haitian too. During the games they are at home watching. There's no crime when there's a soccer game."
The sport's importance in Haitian society dates to pre-Columbian times when the Taino Indians, who then inhabited the island, celebrated important festivals with a game that closely resembled modern-day soccer. Despite the country's limited international success in soccer, that hasn't lessened the sport's emotional hold on Haiti. Virtually every street and vacant plot of land there has been pressed into service as a soccer pitch at one time or another. "Soccer is everywhere in Haiti. That's how I started playing: in the streets, playing with kids," Jacques says.
Haitian soccer got its next big push from Pele and the Brazilian national team, which together won three World Cups between 1958 and 1970. Ninety-five percent of the Haitian population is black so the success of Brazil's largely black team was inspiring.
"Brazil was the first team to win the World Cup with blacks. And the greatest player in soccer was a black guy," says Lemoine, a mortgage broker in Florida, home to more than 40% of the half-million Haitians living in the U.S. "So Haiti embraced soccer like Canada embraced hockey."
And Haiti, like Brazil, wound up breaking a barrier of its own when it became just the second Caribbean country to qualify for the World Cup in 1974. "I was 9 years old and I remember that day," Lemoine says. "An hour before the [opening round] game there was nobody in the street. The Duvalier regime put some TVs in parks and the parks were full. Everybody had a little transistor radio in their ear. It was something awesome."
There are some who feel that, with the recent success of Haiti's national team and the World Cup appearance of the under-17 team this summer, the Haitian soccer program may be entering a new phase.
And that, many Haitians hope, will provide a positive image of their homeland to the world at large.
"1974. That's going to be my reference," says Henry Sanon, a youth coach and former president of South Florida's Haitian soccer federation. "People thought of Haiti in a different way. In the news [now] ...you hear about the poverty. You hear about the crime. People coming on boats and things like that.
"But the reality still exists that there's another world. Hopefully if we keep advancing people will have a different way to think about Haiti."
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