"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."