Haiti reaches the World Cup and Sanon beats Dino Zoff

Haiti qualified for the football World Cup in 1974 and played in West Germany. It has not returned since. The country had almost no sporting infrastructure, its players trained without proper facilities, and the government spent close to nothing on athletics, which made arriving at all an achievement. In the match against Italy, Emmanuel Sanon, born in Port-au-Prince on 25 June 1951, ran onto a ball and beat Dino Zoff, ending a shutout streak of more than a thousand minutes that was the longest on record in international football. Italy scored three afterwards. Haiti lost all three group matches and went home. That single goal is one of the few images of Haiti from the 1970s that travelled abroad without a dictator in it, which is part of why people still talk about it. Sanon became one of the best known athletes the country has produced. He died in Port-au-Prince on 11 August 2008.

Haitians who reached the United States by boat at the end of the 1970s were held in detention camps, some of them in the deserts of the Southwest. They were given hearings and deportation orders without access to lawyers. Children were imprisoned. Detainees reported being fed food laced with drugs that caused men to develop breasts. Most of those affected had no permanent resident status and little protection, and they held public demonstrations and pickets anyway. The protests worked far enough that Haitian refugees were granted a temporary category called Entrant, and for a period the imprisonment and the deportations stopped. Through the 1980s the community organisations that had run those pickets began working with American legal groups such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, and busloads of Haitians travelled to Washington to demonstrate in support of cases being argued in court. That combination of street mobilisation and litigation became the standing method of Haitian politics in the United States.

Haiti lodged its first membership application three years after Jean-Claude Duvalier took over, and twelve months after the regional body itself came into being. Duvalier officials led by Serge Fourcand, minister of commerce and industry, campaigned in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and Guyana, arguing that Haiti stood at the threshold of CARICOM. Eric Williams in Trinidad saw promise in bringing Haiti closer to the English-speaking Caribbean, and the strongest support came from P. J. Patterson in Jamaica. The Secretariat nonetheless declined membership and agreed only to a special relationship. Smith's finding is that the dictatorship was not what restrained CARICOM. Heads of state avoided statements about the Haitian government even as the regional press highlighted Duvalier's abuses. The obstacle was anxiety about the strain that widening membership would put on an institution still establishing its own legitimacy. Where this account departs from the standard one: Smith rejects the assumption that CARICOM held Haiti at arm's length in 1974 because of the Duvalier dictatorship, arguing the restraint was institutional caution about enlargement.

The Duvaliers held power in Haiti from 1957, and by the end of the 1970s the reckoning stood at more than thirty thousand people disappeared, victims of a daily repression built up into a system of government, and close to a million Haitians in exile for economic or political reasons. The country was kept alive by international aid that in practice protected foreign capital and the local fraction allied with it. American power on its own does not explain how one family took the state and held it. Haitian opposition groups had proved unable to produce a radical critique of the language the regime spoke, and often reproduced that language without noticing, out of fear of an analysis that would show where it came from. Explaining the regime as a natural inclination of the masses toward dictatorship was the most common form of that failure.