Vodou Props (Rugby in the 4 Haitis)

Thanks mate. I've been a bit busy so the last few updates are shamefully late but it's not dead and I should have something up by Tuesday.

Well yes. So this was over three months ago.

Part of the problem was that I started reviewing what I'd already written and I decided I didn't like a lot of the decisions I'd made.

For one North Haiti was the one that still practiced Vodou while the South had it banned. That doesn't make sense to me, King Henri was the one who in otl invested the most into education and into destroying the vodou religion. The south, as I've described it, simply wouldn't have the power to ban a religion out right because government control is very weak but the North does. It's more logical for the North to be catholic and the south to be the vodou republic.

For another, I've used French names for the North Haitian nobility (Henri, Jacques, Michel etc) and yet in otl King Henri spelt his name King Henry, the English way, in order to distance himself from the French. Logically in a successful Kingdom of Haiti, it'd be Henry, Jack and Michael.

So I rewrote the timeline and posted it on sealion press forums, (in the writing forum which is members only but it's free to join) it's a bit longer and a little different (I made the changes mentioned above) but 85% the same. I've edited to the new version which I think works a little better.

I also finished the story over there so what I will do is cross post the last two parts here. Thank you very much for anyone who was kind enough to like and comment on the earlier parts, it meant a lot to me. Hopefully you still remember what was going on some months later.
 
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"When we in Europe speak of the four Haitis, it implies somewhat that all four are around the same size. The truth is that the three independent Haitian nations added together only account to around 3/8ths of the land area of Haiti and around 40% of the population. The majority of the Island of Haiti or, as Colombians often prefer to call it, Hispaniola belongs to the Republic of Colombia.

Spanish Haiti had always been slightly apart from the French speaking western part even after it had been handed to France in 1795 and so during the Haitian Revolution, while Dessalines was establishing his Empire in the west, the East was reconquered by criollos from Puerto Rico and returned to the hands of Spain. It did not last however, in 1821 Spain was driven out once again, this time by the white Spanish landowners who'd won them back the territory in the first place but who grew tired of mismanagement from Madrid. They declared the Republic of Spanish Haiti and, much like Puerto Rico did decades later, petitioned to join the Republic of Colombia which in those days, before the Peruvian Revolution and the loss of territory in the Andean War, was still seen as the strongest power in the New World. Boyer in South Haiti hesitated. He had decent relations with Bolivar, the President of Colombia, Boyer had helped him fight his war of Independence in return for Bolivar freeing slaves in South America and, in return, Bolivar had openly praised the Haitian Republic and called it a ‘bastion of freedom’ though he had not offered formal recognition, but Spanish Haiti had not yet freed all their slaves and what free blacks existed were calling for unification with their brothers to the west not strangers from across the sea. If Boyer who, unlike Bolivar, had an army at hand, had marched on Santo Domingo then he probably could have taken the country without a fight. But he didn’t, King Henry still lurked on his Northern Border and Boyer was advised that sending an army to Santo Domingo would encourage an invasion from the North. Instead he welcomed the petition and merely pointedly reminded Bolivar of his promise regarding slaves.

Bolivar died in 1822, but his successors fulfilled his promises and the People’s Republic has traditionally had better relations with its eastern neighbour than either of its northern ones. Colombia is federated, much like the United States it was partly inspired by, and so the department of Spanish Haiti has largely been self-governing and isolated from Bogotán politics, more worried about Port-au-Prince than Lima. In this way it was fortunately spared the worst of the violence of the liberal wars on its home soil. That does not however mean that the population don’t still bear the scars of that conflict, it contributed a large part of the soldiers of the government army that fought the rebels much like it had to the army which fought the endless, unpopular and expensive wars that defined the early years of Colombia, sending troops to Peru as well as serving as the primary base for the Colombian intervention in the Cuban war of independence and providing the bulk of the ill-fated expeditionary army that fought for Yucatan in the caste war. Even now, with the country thankfully at peace, the reputation of the Black Soldiers of Santo Domingo means that several recruiters for foreign armies have offices in the blacker areas of the city.

As the Army goes, so too does the Rugby Team, in 2014, 10 of the starting 15 in Colombia’s World Cup game against New Zealand were from Haiti. Notable but not surprising perhaps given Rugby’s minority sport status in the Hispanophone and the way Courtball, despite its superficial resemblance to the old Taíno game Batey, has never quite caught on in Cibao and Ozuna. But despite this, no team from Spanish Haiti plays in the top flight of the Colombian Rugby League (which, while nowhere near as popular as Courtball, still gets decent attendances, 32,000 watched the recent Bogotá Derby).

Rugby in Spanish Haiti has much of the same problems as Rugby in South Haiti, their best players leave early. They play for clubs in Caracas and Medellin and Panama City. Dieujuste believed the local authorities could be convinced to withdraw their clubs from the Colombian lower leagues to join his new, hopefully more prestigious, and certainly closer, Haitian League. It is not an entirely novel idea, Celtic teams in England and France play in the Celtic League with their independent Irish and Scottish brothers after all, and, perhaps more relevantly, the six colonial enclaves in New Guinea send their teams to play with the two native Kingdoms rather than on long flights back to their European homes. But it’d be asking for the authorities to go against Bogotá, a difficult thing for any Colombian bureaucrat to do. In this however Dieujuste had a trump card because the most powerful people in Colombian sport aren’t in the government, they’re in the drug cartels.

The drug cartels of Colombia came to prominence during the Liberal wars when the central government was weakened by the fights with rebels. In a mirror of the PurKongo of Gonâve or the Mafia of Sicily when the central government began to withdraw from the villages the gangs stepped in. They provided their own shadow government, with their own industry, their own army and their own enforcement of law. Similar gangs later grew to power in Peru and Bolivia when the communist empire there collapsed. Forests of drugs are manufactured in South America in areas where the governments have no real control and sent north to feed the gaping appetite of American drug addicts.

The Colombian Caribbean Islands are notorious as drop off points in this great movement of drugs. The advantage of them is goods moving from mainland Colombia to San Andrés, Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo are not crossing any international borders and so encounter less security. From there some cross into South Haiti, to Gonâve and others go to the American controlled Lucayan islands, which has a large enough coast line that smuggling is rampant and then find that flights from Nassau are also considered internal.

And inevitably they have their own local gangs who act as middleman and grow fat on their cut on South America’s most profitable export trade. In Santo Domingo that is the Felix organisation and they were very interested in a Haitian rugby league. Why would they not be when old man Felix himself is rumoured to have been an ex rugby player? The early Mafiosi were often sportsmen; there are few things more intimidating when running a racket then a rugby player wearing a suit.

Dieujuste had not turned to them straight away. We had spent many an unproductive day being stonewalled by the officials from the ministry of sport and by representatives of the clubs themselves but nobody was willing to agree on anything if the Felix organization was not first on side.

The Felix organization were big fish in a small pond but they had ambitions. In Bogotá the largest rugby team, Millonarios, is a sister club of the much more famous Millonarios courtball team. And Millonarios, as everyone knows, is run by the Black Eagles Cartel. It has been since an ambitious chairman of it invited the local drug runners onto the board in order to protect the club from the violence of the Liberal wars. The Cartel is heavily involved in sports betting but it also uses the club as the official legal front for its business. The club is the one that buys licences to export goods and runs joint ventures with foreign companies as tax dodges, the club offers important politicians private seats at their stadium where discussions can be had out of the ear of bugs and in return the courtball and rugby teams get to be the best paid and protected in the country. It is a cosy arrangement and one which the Felix gang wanted to copy.

Only the Black Eagles were an important trading partner of the Felixes and they guarded their sporting dominance jealously. Felix investing too heavily in a club in the Colombian League would be an unfriendly act. But a Haitian league was territory that nobody else had claimed, it was an opportunity. Dieujuste had found a partner who could hand him 4 teams from Spanish Haiti and provide some of the money he needed to attract the players for it. He, and the South Haitian government he represented, only had to meet their price.

I was not present at the discussions, I do not know exactly what was agreed. I can only tell you that Dieujuste did not wear the look of a triumphant man when he returned from them. And that I read in the paper a few months later in London that talks about a 4 nation anti smuggling naval patrol around the island of Haiti had fallen apart."
 
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"I returned from Haiti in June 2015, 6 months ago, with eight notebooks filled with notes. I spent the next week on my computer turning those, often illegible, notes into various articles for various newspapers and magazines. Rugby magazines got details of the players and clubs that this new league would involve and my tips for break out stars in the Trans American Championship, travel magazines and newspapers got something closer to the articles I’ve shared here, as much about the island’s history and politics as it is about the sport.

The latter pleases me more, I do not think you can talk about rugby without also talking about politics and history. Since I have last been to Haiti and talked to Dieujuste the league he dreamed of has been announced as starting in 2019, there will be one team from Cap Henry, Les Cayes, Santiago and La Romana and two each from Port-au-Prince and Santo Domingo. I should be happy for him, I thought I would be, it is clear to me that there is both a market for such a league and a need for it.

Two different and unrelated events which happened this December have proved that. The first and most obvious is that, for the second ever time and the first in 20 years, South Haiti won the Trans American Championship. Their win over the USA in the final was one of the greatest moments in recent sporting history, a david vs goliath victory that served as a complete redemption for the failures of 2014. The conclusive third goal in a 3-1 victory, which saw young star Jephte Panton running 50 yards for the try before taking the kick himself and burying it between the posts, was arguably the goal of the decade. And the shot of him throwing his helmet in the air in celebration while, behind him, the Haitian born American star Jean-Claude Jean sank to the turf in despair was posted with glee to all the four corners of the internet. Everybody wanted South Haiti to win and were delighted at the wild celebrations that swept over the Island nation as a result. And it was not just because the USA and Jean-Claude Jean’s attitude rubs many European fans the wrong way but because South Haiti seemed to have little else, poor and corrupt and riddled with crime. Why shouldn’t they at least have sports success to cheer for?

And why shouldn’t they make some money out of Jephte Panton for that matter? He is now the world’s most marketable teenager and yet because his first club was Racing Paris, none of that money will come back to Haiti. Surely I should be happy that such an injustice is soon to be ended?

And yet the second incident and one much less reported was that the bodies of 30 men, women and children thought to be killed by the Felix organization drug cartel were found when a pond was drained in Santo Domingo. For all the joy and pleasure that sport, that Rugby, brings to Haiti you cannot separate it from the people who benefit from it, from the Felix gang and from Prince Michael whose government will get to talk about the bread and circuses of their new team and not their lack of real democracy or the torture of dissidents in their jails.

And yet when I was writing this, I heard a radio report that yet another English Rugby Player has been found to have taken illegal drugs. I think perhaps that if my friend Joe Gaetjens had come to the British Isles to write a similar article he would have come to similar conclusions about our own sport. We too are an Island archipelago controlled by four different nations, we too have leaders who have not always lived up to the standards which we pride ourselves as having reached for, we too are a poor country by the standards of our neighbours and yet we share a passion for sport, for Rugby, that means we punch well above our weight. He would acknowledge our passion and our talent but perhaps he’d have reservations about some of the owners of our clubs, about the routine allegations of doping and of bribing referees and about a department of sport which seems very much to serve the interests of the clubs rather than the fans. Perhaps he’d say that until the corruption and money and crime that leached off the sport we loved was dealt with, he could not be fully happy at the prospect of an English Rugby League."
 
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