COMMENTARY Haiti's remarkable qualification for the 2026 soccer World Cup won't rescue it from the country's gangs — but it reminds us that Haiti undoubtedly is worth saving from that monstrous evil.
Haitian businessman Patrice Millet knows what the face of his country is — and what it is not.
He knows it is most certainly Louicius Deedson.
He knows it is most emphatically not Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier.
Millet knows, because for two decades he’s mentored and aided soccer players like Deedson and Leverton Pierre — who this week led Haiti’s national men’s squad to a place in the World Cup for the first time since 1974.
Millet founded and directs the youth support nonprofit FONDAPS, which started as a soccer program for disadvantaged Port-au-Prince kids — but has evolved into a refuge that helps keep them out of the gangs that all but rule Haiti today.
Those gangs are run by thugs like Cherizier, whose criminal confederation — known perversely as Viv Ansanm, or Live Together, in Haitian Creole — last week staged an armed takeover of the Port-au-Prince suburb of Tabarre, where Deedson and Pierre grew up. The violence forced more than 600 Tabarre residents from their homes.
READ MORE: Ann ale, Grenadiers! The Haitian women's soccer team is the Haiti we should root for
Qualifying for next summer’s World Cup won’t rescue Haiti from the clutches of monsters like Cherizier.
But — like the Haitian women’s team’s joyful, first-time-ever World Cup appearance in 2023 — it does help free the beleaguered Caribbean nation from the undeserved image of Mad Max mobsterism and anarchy it’s been saddled with in this decade.
And that matters greatly in reminding the U.S. and the international community that Haiti unquestionably is worth rescuing from its current gang plague, which has turned more than a million honest, hardworking Haitians into refugees and killed thousands of others.
“I work with these kids because I know Haiti has a future — and this week, as adults, they proved it again, proved Haitians together can fight back."Patrice Millet
“I work with these kids because I know Haiti has a future,” Millet told me here in Miami, where he’s been living recently for medical treatment.
“And [this week] Louicius and Leverton proved as adults that this is true — they proved what Haitians can do when we work together.
“They proved again Haitians can fight back.”
Beating Napoleon's army
To second that point, my WLRN colleague, Haitian-American Wilkine Brutus, points out that Nov. 18 — the day this week the Haitian men’s team defeated Nicaragua 2-0, to punch their ticket to the 2026 World Cup — was the anniversary of the Battle of Vertrières, which was fought in 1803.
Vertrières marked the Haitian Revolution’s defeat of Napoleon’s army and Haiti’s independence as the world’s first Black republic.
Deedson, Haiti’s 24-year-old right winger, scored the first goal against Nicaragua with a left-footed strike that seemed to echo the Haitian team’s motto, Grenadye alaso! Onward, soldiers!
A rallying cry like that, even if it is just a soccer chant, can resonate when the U.N. itself is trying to press onward with a new solution to Haiti’s independence from gang dominance.
The Kenya-led Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission deployed last year to help Haiti’s overwhelmed police has proven woefully inadequate to the task. So last month a larger contingent, the Gang Suppression Force, or GSF, was created to confront Cherizier and company.
Even so, the U.N. acknowledges it will “take time to build” the GSF and that “it is still not clear which countries will provide personnel.” It will also “be funded primarily through voluntary contributions from U.N. member states.”
Those qualifiers sound a lot less convincing than Deedson’s winning shot against Nicaragua Tuesday night.
But Deedson and Pierre — and their families and friends now living under Cherizier’s boot heel — ought to make us aware that the world has to get more serious about sending serious police or even military backup into Haiti.
That’s because it’s not just Port-au-Prince that’s under gang control now: in recent weeks gangs have swallowed more cities in the interior, including the seaside tourist site of Montrouis.
I applaud Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s efforts to lead the upgrade from the MSS to the GSF. But even Rubio last week conceded that while the U.S. has ponied up the first phase of GSF funding, a lot more money and manpower is needed, especially from other countries, to make it work.
France and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) say they want to forge a stronger partnership to liberate Haiti.
Then do it, si vous plait.
And do it before the World Cup starts this coming summer — so Haiti can showcase more of its real face, along with its soccer team.
