Luc Cherisson did not have to come as far and live as long and hard as so many who have been waiting to watch Haiti in the World Cup again. But he had his own way to make. The general manager of a rental-car business in Atlanta, an immigrant who left his homeland for America when he was just 20, Cherisson is 36 now, with a friendly face and an amiable disposition that suggest he is always happy to assist his customers with their SUV reservations. He flew into Philadelphia International Airport on Friday morning for his home country’s World Cup match against Brazil, and he would fly back to Atlanta on Saturday morning, a little hungover if a slight miracle materialized at Lincoln Financial Field.
“Even if we lose, it’s still a win for me,” he said a few hours before the match, as he lingered in a parking lot outside Xfinity Mobile Arena. “And if Haiti wins, it will be a party all night.”
There was no miracle. There was only an easy 3-0 victory for Brazil, though Cherisson and the thousands of Haitian natives and fans who attended the match may yet have caroused deep into the Philadelphia night, just for the sake of their home country’s presence here. This is Haiti’s first appearance in the World Cup since its only other one, in 1974. For Cherisson and those like him, for a nation long riven with poverty and corruption and violence, where roving gangs control the capital city of Port-au-Prince and practically govern the country, there is honor and glory merely in earning the right to be here.
“It’s amazing,” Cherisson said. “It’s the biggest sporting event in the world. Just being part of the World Cup is fantastic.”
It might sound silly and Pollyannish to regard just competing at the highest level and grandest stage of the world’s most popular sport as worthy of such pride. How much of FIFA’s multibillion-dollar budget goes toward orange slices and participation trophies? But one has to have just an inkling of the hold that soccer has in Haitian society to appreciate why Cherisson would pay a small fortune to travel to Boston to see Haiti’s 1-0 loss to Scotland last Saturday, to make that 24-hour trip into town for Friday night’s game, and to secure tickets for Haiti’s match against Morocco in Atlanta next Wednesday. Why no one at the Linc much cares that Haiti has now been outscored 18-2 in the five World Cup matches in its history. Why this all matters so much.
The author Madison Smartt Bell, for instance, who in 2014 completed a trilogy of rich and gorgeously written historical novels about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, still owns a patch of land in the northern part of the country, not far from the forests where the revolution was conceived in 1791. One day, Bell saw several children scurrying around on rough, spiny ground, playing soccer not with a ball or even an empty can of condensed milk, but with a rock.
On his next visit to Haiti, he brought them a regulation soccer ball. The children were ecstatic, but after 10 minutes, they paused their game for a moment. Something sharp had punctured and deflated the ball. So they went back to kicking and passing and shooting the stone.
“I think that gives you some idea,” Bell said in an email, “of the importance of soccer in Haitian culture.”
If that doesn’t, this might: Before Haiti’s first match in the ‘74 World Cup, against Italy, “extraordinary legends spread all throughout the country,” said Terry Rey, a Temple University professor of Latin American studies who has written extensively about Haiti and even lived there for six years in the 1990s. Customarily, because their national team had not qualified for the World Cup yet, Haitians divided their loyalties when the event commenced every four years. The poor rooted for Brazil, the elites for Argentina.
But now Haiti, at last, was part of the spectacle. So peasants somehow found the funds to buy transistor radios and batteries so they could listen to the match. People painted and decorated tap taps, the vans and pickup trucks that are used as taxis in the country, with renditions of the team’s players. And when Haitian star Emmanuel Sanon scored the game’s first goal, “people will tell you there wasn’t a place in the entire nation where you didn’t hear someone screaming,” Rey said. Italy won the match, 3-1.
Are these unfavorable final scores irrelevant to the Haitian people? No. It’s just that the sport itself carries so much meaning there, offers so cleansing a respite from all that ails the country. The 1994 World Cup began in July with Haiti trapped amid a period of tumult and persecution, its people under the thumb of a junta regime run by Raoul Cédras, the former head of Haiti’s military, who had taken power in a coup three years earlier. From January to June that year, there was no electricity available anywhere. Then, just in time for the World Cup, the lights went on. There was electricity, and there was cable TV. Cédras had bought the rights to broadcast the tournament, and the opportunity to watch it would quell any widespread desire for a revolt against the regime.
“Haitians love soccer,” Rey said. “It’s just powerful.”
They loved it Friday night, despite the lopsided outcome, despite another loss for a nation waiting for a win that would mean everything. Late into the match, late into the night, having traveled so far and still waiting so long, they were chanting and singing in the parking lots and stomping their feet in the stands and standing to cheer, happy to have reason to be proud. Funny. In a city where there is a long and treasured tradition of telling outsiders and interlopers to go kick rocks, this celebration was still joyous enough.
