Kreyòl translation coming soon.

In 2004, just a few months after Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced to leave power, I was bored on a bus headed to Verrettes for summer break. Political unrest had shut the country down; my father, fearing the worst, had suggested I come home from the capital as soon as possible. It was in this context that 2004’s Match for Peace between Haiti and Brazil took place, and despite the gunfire and clashes happening in the streets, I was devastated to miss the game. Given the contrast between the immense legacy of the Seleção, the nickname of the Brazilian national football team, and the political crisis that we found ourselves in, it was more than just a football match.

I, like most people I knew, was a football fanatic, and the Seleção was my obsession. I had discovered my passion for them on a small black-and-white television one afternoon in 1997 at the home of Mr. Smith, who was himself once a goalkeeper for the great Verrettes team known as les Missionnaires. I wasn’t the only one in Haiti who was obsessed. Whenever Brazil plays, the whole country holds its breath. You don't even need a television to know the score: the echoing screams, the gunshots, and the weeping of grown men tell you everything. Our admiration had everything to do with our own fates in football history. In 2004, Brazil had won seven Copa Americas and five World Cups, and it boasted a plethora of international stars, including Cafù, Roberto Carlos, Ronaldo, Rivaldo, and the rising star Ronaldinho. Haiti had, up to that point, only one appearance at a World Cup final, in 1974, and had appeared in a few regional competitions. This friendly was the game of a lifetime. And yet, there I was, on a bus to my hometown of Verrette, more than 50km away from the capital and from the match of my dreams.

The parade of Brazilian players atop the chariots of freshly arrived Brazilian UN soldiers perfectly symbolized our national situation at the time. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s rise to power in Brazil, driven by a vast popular movement, marked an important renewal for the Latin American left. (Afterward, Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Evo Morales in Bolivia would come to sit alongside Castro in Cuba and Chavez in Venezuela.) The dependency theory and liberation philosophy dominating intellectual and political debate across the continent had also borne fruit in the courtyard of the église Saint-Jean Bosco, where priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide officiated. 

At that time, I did not understand the irony while I cheered for the Seleção: Aristide’s forced exile, Lula sending UN soldiers, and a football match played to pacify us. I was 14 years old, the age of fleeting sorrows.

Like Lula, Aristide had been swept to power by a vast popular movement that began in 1971 during the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier. Aristide’s demands for social justice were translated into political action on December 16, 1990, when he won the presidential election with more than 60% of the vote. However, on the eve of that match in 2004, Aristide, hero of an entire people, after being kidnapped by the US, had just landed in the Central African Republic. At that time, I did not understand the irony while I cheered for the Seleção: Aristide’s forced exile, Lula sending UN soldiers, and a football match played to pacify us. I was 14 years old, the age of fleeting sorrows.

The regret of not seeing my heroes gave way to the enthusiasm I felt over the neighborhood football team, Real de la Cité, which was taking part in the Ti Kan championship, held every summer in Verrettes. The team’s name referenced the neighborhood it came from: Rue Cité des Fleurs. It was on that street with my older cousin Hilaire that I touched a football for the first time. And, it was from that street that I watched my idol Ronaldo Nazario walk onto the pitch at Stade Silvio Cator, 50 km away in the capital. During the match, Haitians everywhere celebrated every Brazilian goal, even as we lost 6-0. Amidst all that celebration, no one even imagined what the UN soldiers had in store for us.

After years of corruption and scandals at the Haitian Football Federation, and a 51-year World Cup drought, Louicius Deedson’s goal against Nicaragua in the 9th minute and fate (or something like it) have landed us in the same group as Brazil at the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Lula is in his third term, and Haiti is going through yet another transition, still with no elected government. This time, however, there are no Brazilian soldiers in the streets; Kenyan ones have taken their place.

FIFA is known for its loyalty to the leaders of corrupt national federations. It is a win-win arrangement between them: protect me, and you can remain head of your federation for life. Former Haitian Football Federation president Yves Jean-Bart, known as Dadou Jean-Bart, was elected in 2000, four years before the Match for Peace and 26 years before our qualification. He ran the federation with an iron fist, forcing delegates, journalists, opponents, and players into silence or face the wrath of the bon papa.

But on April 30, 2020, The Guardian reported sexual crimes against minors organized and perpetrated by Jean-Bart. These acts dated back to 2015 and involved girls as young as 14. A rally was organized to clear his name, with Haitian players holding signs that read: “Nou se Dadou” (We are Dadou). Later, it emerged that these young people had been forced to participate in that rally because their lives and those of their loved ones were in danger. The newspaper reported that gang members were even paid to intimidate the victims. Dadou’s supporters then retaliated against the federation's normalization committee by attacking Dadou’s predecessor, Madame Monique André, when she took over the presidency.

Haiti is still plagued by the same corrupt governance that allows for this dynamic. Today, Port-au-Prince and its surrounding cities are under siege by armed groups funded by politicians and the elite. Entire parts of the country are cut off from one another, making travel and coordination between regions virtually impossible. As a result, the current Haiti team has not been able to play a single home game.

Decades of corrupt governance and foreign intervention have pushed families out of Haiti in a relentless mass exodus. The players who qualified Haiti for this World Cup are the children of people who fled the same circumstances. Sports commentator and historian Patrice Dumont interprets this state of affairs as a paternalism integral to the country’s political culture, in which the figure of the bon papa crushes any urge to dissent. It is a legacy that comes straight from the Duvalier dictatorship. He explains:

"It was Claude Raymond who was president of the federation, a civil servant from the National Palace, a military man under Jean-Claude Duvalier. Raymond promised the players that if they qualified, they would receive $10,000, plots of land, and cars. None of that ever happened. When the players asked, they were told that they were causing trouble, and they were accused of trying to overthrow the government. This paternalism fosters a climate of fear, but above all of precarity."

This generation of Grenadiers, most of them children of the diaspora, qualified without ever setting foot on Haitian soil. Wilson Isidor scoring goals for Sunderland, Jean-Ricner Bellegarde running midfield for Wolverhampton Wanderers, Duckens Nazon, Haiti's all-time leading scorer, now playing in Iran. They won every qualifying game on foreign territory. Dumont remarks, “So today, this team is the diaspora's team. 85 to 90 percent of the players either left the country early or were born abroad. It is an extraordinary moment. I call them the prodigal sons.”

Currently, the Donald Trump administration is pursuing a racist policy in which Haitians are being hunted, humiliated, and imprisoned. Given the evident collusion between the interests of FIFA and Donald Trump on one hand, and the inhumane treatment of Haitians in the United States on the other, it is more urgent than ever to pay attention to critiques of the World Cup. How can one celebrate in this imperialist, colonial, and racist context? 

We qualified without a national championship, without infrastructure, in a country ruled by armed groups and facing an alarming socio-economic crisis. But we will be there, in the United States of America, to defend the Haitian bicolore.

We qualified without a national championship, without infrastructure, in a country ruled by armed groups and facing an alarming socio-economic crisis. But we will be there, in the United States of America, to defend the Haitian bicolore.

At the final whistle of Haiti’s 2-0 victory over Nicaragua in a World Cup qualifier played in Willemstad, Curaçao, thousands of images flashed before my eyes. I saw myself as a child running through the streets of Verrettes, in the middle of a crowd celebrating a neighborhood game victory. I am now in my 30s, and my sorrows are no longer fleeting. In the qualifiers, Haiti rebounded from a 3-0 loss to Honduras to top Group C, with Deedson's ninth-minute strike sealing the 2-0 win over Nicaragua in Curaçao that clinched the spot. And with every goal scored, you could see the players and crowd dancing in joy.

As if by poetic justice, Haiti has qualified for the 2026 World Cup with Monique André at the head of the federation: our star women’s team representative, Corventina, and her former Haitian teammates now rub shoulders with the brightest stars in the football galaxy. This moment is a reminder that Haiti is a country where the most vulnerable, the defeated, often have the last word. 

I took the opportunity to browse social media to see what was being said about this historic moment. Scrolling through Facebook, I came across images of a crowd accompanied by a Rara group celebrating the Grenadiers’ feat. Beyond the festive atmosphere, one phrase stayed with me: “The State doesn't care about us, but we qualified.” At that very moment, the assembled crowd made its swaying, every bead of sweat, and every word into a political gesture.

From the “people who sing, who dance, and who resign themselves,” written by Jean Price-Mars in the early 1930s, to the tribulations and joys of the Haitian people in Jean Casimir’s recent work, dance and song are never far from the Haitian people. All the great moments of our collective life as a people have been accompanied by song and dance. It is not unusual to see a mother dancing in front of the lifeless body of her child, shot in the head by a UN soldier in Cité Soleil.

Florian, 32, a fellow conflicted Haitian football fan, said this to me: 

"This has been a study of the idea of 'we can’t have nice things.' And, because we just can’t have nice things, of course, it would happen against a backdrop of all this shit. Of course, it would be hosted by the most overtly hostile US government in a long time. Of course, it would be while home is going through its most tumultuous period in a very long time. Of course, it would be organized by the most nakedly greedy and shamelessly corrupt FIFA governing body anyone can remember, and it would price out the people who would most passionately want to attend the games. So while the magic of football can often be a salve to help cope with the many ills of the world, the ills might be too numerous and too grave for even the greatest sport in the world."

So, with some friends, we tried to exorcise that spleen, to borrow the title of a poem by Charles Moravia. We will invent, create, and recreate Haiti. A qualification calls for a celebration. Drinks, chicken, and laughter. Most of us are in Canada for our studies, while others are waiting for their immigration status to be regularized. We put on music. Because you must always dance.

Should we celebrate the World Cup played in the US, where FIFA and Donald Trump seem to be comfortably in bed? I don’t know. What I do know is that Haitians are going to continue to dance our qualification. Because for us, a song or a dance is never just a song or a dance. Maybe if we dance until we reach a trance, the answer will emerge from that cathartic moment on its own.

This piece was originally written in French.