A Tiny Island Nation's Big World Cup Dream: Cabo Verde Arrives
It started with a crowd at Boston's Logan Airport on a June afternoon. A hundred people waving flags, holding scarves, singing songs. Someone brought a whistle. Travelers waiting for loved ones might have wondered: What is this Cabo Verde, and why all the joy?
Cabo Verde—the third-smallest nation ever to qualify for the World Cup by population, and second-smallest by land area—had just landed for its first tournament. The players were about to walk into the arms of the largest Cabo Verdean diaspora in the U.S., some 70,000 in Massachusetts and 21,000 in Rhode Island. Then an airport official appeared. The team would board a bus directly from the tarmac. No arrival hall celebration.
Disappointment flickered across faces. Then the crowd started singing: "Look where we're walking, look where we're standing, we're all over the world."
That song, by Soraia Ramos, captures something essential about Cabo Verdeans. More people live abroad—between 1.5 and 2 million—than at home, where the population hovers around 500,000. The reason traces back to the weather. It rarely rains. Droughts and famines scar the history. An iconic song, "Fomi 47," mourns the famine of 1947. Childhood memories include watching the sky for clouds, the relief of rain, the heartbreak of departures.
How did so many Cabo Verdeans end up in New England? Whaling. In the 19th century, ships from New Bedford drew men from the islands. New Bedford became the wealthiest city per capita in America during the 1840s and 1850s, fueled by whale oil. A connection was forged that never broke.
Genie Lomba, 61, lives in Connecticut now. She co-founded Cabo Verdeans United, which builds playgrounds and sends soccer balls to the islands. She remembers living with her grandparents as a child while her mother worked in Rhode Island. She remembers the day she left Cabo Verde at 14, standing on a boat, watching her aunt wave a white handkerchief from the dock. To this day, she can't stand a dripping faucet. "I quake," she says.
Alex Do Souto, 67, owns a barbershop in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood. He arrived in 1985 with $9.50 an hour at a sneaker factory. He now owns three shops and a festival house on his home island, Fogo. He remembers walking donkeys 14 miles for water, waiting hours when the tide brought salt. "My kids! Lucky!" he says of his three college-educated children.
Ed Lopes, 30, drove a water delivery truck in Maine when Cabo Verde clinched its World Cup spot last October. He heard "golo" blasting from the radio and scrambled to the driver's seat. "I just wanted to see a Cape Verdean just to give him a hug. I was in Maine! I couldn't!"
The victory, he says, was for the kids playing barefoot on sand, for mothers selling fruit at dawn, for fishermen risking the ocean. "The victory was for us."
Now the team—the Blue Sharks—faces Spain, Uruguay, and Saudi Arabia in group play. In Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the diaspora is ready. A fashion show featured a model dressed as a blue shark. Thousands packed a stadium in Pawtucket for traditional dances. At a friendly against Bermuda, 10,000 fans wore jerseys with the slogan "NO STRESS." Five guys brought drums.
After that match, the players spent an hour walking the edge of the stands, posing for selfies, handing phones back. A woman asked midfielder Yannick Semedo to climb into the stands for photos. He did. People said thanks. Players said thanks.
Dark clouds gathered overhead, promising rain. But the crowd stayed, drumming and singing. Because metaphorically, the rain had already come—in the form of a World Cup berth that made this small, far-flung nation feel like the center of something wonderful.