The first hint of World Cup wonder concerning one tiny nation arose in the mid-afternoon of June 2 at Logan Airport in Boston in a vast room freighted with human meaning: international arrivals. That's where a hundred-strong throng carried flags and held up scarves and sang songs, and somebody brought along a whistle. Any everyday people standing nearby, holding flowers and balloons for incoming travelers, might have wondered: What is this Cabo Verde, and why is it so euphoric?
Cabo Verde, the third-smallest tournament qualifier ever by population, and the second smallest by land area, had touched down to begin a debut World Cup campaign. The dreamy truth really was the dreamy truth for a country with a past both heartbreaking and uplifting. The players would file out from customs for a cascade of love from a portion of the largest Cabo Verdean diaspora in the United States -- around 70,000 in Massachusetts, 21,000 in Rhode Island -- some of whom had driven irksome distances through the Boston gauntlet.
But, then: An airport official materialized. The players would not emerge but would board a bus directly from inside Logan.
Anticipation morphed to disappointment.
The revelers frowned briefly, one by one, as word spread.
Then they sang.
Look where we're walking
Look where we're standing
We're all over the world
Look where we've gone
We're spread all throughout the world
Those lyrics, from a recent-years anthem by Soraia Ramos (translated here from Cabo Verdean Creole), pertain directly to Cabo Verdeans, whose legacy of alighting in places around the world has annexed a stirring example with this World Cup.
"Just the fact that our name's going around the world, that people will say our name," Ed Lopes, 30, marveled in Terminal E. "They'll pull up their phones and see, 'Cabo Verde,' and they'll be amazed by what they see."
Now, if by chance you hail from some oversized country accustomed to attention, you might struggle to pinpoint this Cabo Verde, or "Cape Verde" in informal parlance. It's among the 54 African countries but not on the mainland, so some callous maps omit it. It's out in the Atlantic about 350 miles off Africa's west coast. It boasts 10 islands, nine inhabited. Humans couldn't find it until the mid-15th century. Portugal colonized it from 1462 to 1975, a 513-year span that included its phase as a geographical hub of the transatlantic trade of enslaved human beings. With the advent of TV weather channels, a Cabo Verdean-American such as Genie Lomba in Connecticut sometimes might hear people say, "Oh, that's where the hurricanes come from."
How nutty, considering the reason for Cabo Verde's long immigration saga, for why Cabo Verde has more people abroad (between 1.5 to 2 million, mostly in the Netherlands, Portugal, Senegal, the United States) than at home (around 500,000). It's the damned weather. It so seldom rains. The history sobs with droughts and famines. An iconic song, the late Codé di Dona's composition "Fomi 47," bemoans the famine of 1947. Childhood stories can include happy days, crushing goodbyes, the fretful faces of parents and grandparents during rainless spells, the glee of fresh rain prompting shedding clothes and romping outdoors, seasickness during emigration departures. Sometimes the rain would deluge, another existential threat. Sometimes a brown island turned quickly green, a marvel. And in case you didn't know for sure, a Cabo Verdean might tell you that coffee made from salt water does not please the tastebuds.
How did so many Cabo Verdeans from around the balmy 14 North parallel wind up around New England's not balmy 41? That one stretches back centuries and owes primarily to an obsolescence -- whaling. Americans and Cabo Verdeans found each other via the seas in the 19th century, and Cabo Verdeans came to work in the economic abundance then derived from doomed whales. As the New Bedford Whaling Museum tells it, New Bedford became "the wealthiest city per capita in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s" as the whaling industry "made New Bedford 'The City That Lit the World.'" Whaling ships streamed out and in until 1925, as tells a historical placard in the still-great New Bedford fishing port with all its sturdy masts and rusty beams. A fluidity between two distant countries had developed.
"My grandfather, he came [to the U.S., in 1918] and went back," said 67-year-old Alex Do Souto. "He raised family and came back [to the U.S.] again. He went back and died [in Cabo Verde]."
Carlos Almeida, a Cabo Verde-raised professor of Portuguese at Bristol Community College in New Bedford, sees "a transnational country, a country that exists simultaneously on the islands and beyond, a country whose identity is built between departures and returns, between longing and belonging." The gratitude that abounds toward the United States and other countries mingles with that longing, as Cabo Verdeans who can't live in Cabo Verde love Cabo Verde deeply, often feeling some inner magic just standing again on Cabo Verdean ground. "I mean, a Cabo Verdean immigrant just lives with that longing for the country," Lopes said. "It's like a small piece of us is just missing." Back at home, two hard thoughts tangle: I want to stay, but I have to go, or, I have to stay, but I want to go.
It's easy, then, to imagine how a whoa of a World Cup berth might fling mirth around the far-flung, given a team that won its qualifying group in Africa last year, that elbowed storied Cameroon into second place, that goes by the nickname Tubarões Azuis (Blue Sharks), and whose players play in leagues from Portugal to Cyprus to the United Arab Emirates to Brazil to MLS and then showered heaps of wonder around, among other places, New England.
That wonder courses through Genie Lomba, who sat lately in her living room in Connecticut, where she and John, husband of 36 years, raised three daughters. With her sister 20 years ago she co-founded Cabo Verdeans United, which travels to build playgrounds and furnish soccer balls to a country where kids once fashioned the latter from pig bladders. She's 61, energetic and charismatic, while every now and then her flowing words halted for flowing tears. She told of living from ages 2 to 14 with her grandparents and very-dear aunt in Cabo Verde while her mother sent support from Rhode Island, and spoke mournfully of 1979 when she and her sister boarded a boat that edged off the dock while their aunt stood on the wharf waving a white handkerchief.
She said of her mother, "I remember her telling me that she felt like the day she left was the day she felt like her heart disappeared." She recalled when the community on her island, Brava, would go to the post office waiting to hear names called indicating mail from abroad, whereupon some would walk home uncalled and sad. She showed a backyard garden of peonies, hibiscus, lantanas, butternut squash, sweet potatoes, beans, corn -- roots that echo her roots.
She talked at length about the laundry.
The monthly voyage toward water for laundry required two hours each way along cliffs from which some had plunged to deaths, or so went the stories. At least she relished the adventure of it, a factor of girlhood. Her aunt and others would bring breakfast, lunch, snacks. "A full day of washing the clothes," she said. "You wash it, you dry on rocks, lay it out on rocks, and then you fold it, you pack it back up, and you would carry it on your head, or if we were lucky and we had donkeys, we could pack it on the donkeys and also bring things on our head."
To this day, she quakes at any faucet running needlessly, including in her laundry room right beside the master bedroom.
The wonder is obvious in Alex Do Souto, who sat lately in a Cabo Verde-owned pizza shop near the barbershop he owns in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. He arrived in the U.S. in 1985 with a wife and baby daughter left behind for a while and went from $9.50 an hour at a sneaker maker to ownership of three barbershops. He built a 2,500-capacity festival house on his home island, Fogo, another hallmark of the Cabo Verdean craving to help the homeland. His path included those telltale words of striving: "night school." He summarized Cabo Verdeans: "Hard work. Committed. And respect for things that we do." At 67, he cuts hair part time by appointment only, in a spirited shop called Las Americas with four chairs, familiar faces and requisite needling.
He talked at length about how it didn't rain in 1971, 1972 or 1973.
His father would direct him and his brother to shepherd four donkeys, one horse and two cows for "14, 15 miles, easy," he said, to a water station named Antonio Afonso near the sea. "Sometimes when the tide is high, the water's salty," he said. "I can [still] feel the salt. And then when it's low, it's normal, there's not enough water. A hundred of us go, you've got to wait hours, before you get everybody water." The daylong process came with a specific instruction from his father: "'You don't mount the horse! You've got to let them go freely! You don't ride on it, because they'll just [tire and] drink the water.'"
Of his three grown and college-educated children, he concluded: "My kids! Lucky!"
And the wonder of this World Cup just about bursts in Ed Lopes, his passion for Cabo Verde entrenched at just 30. His father died when he was 1; he lived until he was 17 with his uncle in Cabo Verde. He sat lately in the dining room he shares with his mother in New Bedford, served coffee from Cabo Verdean beans, offered Cabo Verdean pastries such as gufong, recommended Cabo Verdean books. He had just finished driving a van with 12 passengers to a friendly in Connecticut and a celebration in Rhode Island as they rehearsed, over and over, the Cabo Verdean national anthem ("Cântico da Liberdade"). He spoke with relish about morabeza, the Cabo Verdean spirit of hospitality he describes as "that warm feeling of walking down the street and somebody's going to greet me."
He has felt the heft of this moment to the point of compromised sleep.
"We say this a lot between ourselves: We are a resilient people," he said. "There's nothing that we cannot do. I mean, we already, like, we came to this world in a country that's in the middle of the ocean. There's nowhere to run. We depend on the rain. We depend on the ocean to give us the fish. So we already know how to make a lot with less, because the situation already put us in that situation, in that hard spot."
A barrel sits perpetually in the basement. He and his mother fill it steadily over weeks. A shipping company arrives to collect it, replace it. It's a custom and a symbol.
For eons, the diaspora has sent goods to fellow Cabo Verdeans at home in barrels that travel, evocatively, by ship. It's so traditional that a barrel sits in the Cabo Verde section of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, where Almeida, the professor, pointed to it and said, "This is very Cabo Verdean, in a sense."
Lomba, the woman in Connecticut, has known both ends of the barrel-shipping. When her grandmother in Cabo Verde would open one of those barrels from her mother in Rhode Island, Lomba said, "They were like somebody had just doused the house with perfume. This beautiful, flowery smell. It's the weirdest thing; it's like used clothing, and she never filled the barrels full of brand-new clothes. But the smell of it was just heavenly, and it's ingrained in my brain to this day...
"We thought of it as the smell of America. 'America's the best! Like, it even smells good!'"
Last Oct. 13, joy arrived in the other direction. Cabo Verde completed its resourceful 10-match, 23-point run through qualifying with a 3-0 win over Eswatini in Praia, the Cabo Verdean capital. Cabo Verdean New Englanders called Cabo Verdean New Englanders, giddy. Champagne corks popped. Lopes, driving a water delivery truck in Maine, had his phone hooked to the truck radio, the driver's side door open and the volume up while he put straps on pallets of water bottles in back. He heard the word "golo" (goal) blasting from the broadcast and scrambled to the driver's seat in rapture. "I just wanted to see a Cape Verdean just to give him a hug," he said. "And I was in Maine! I couldn't!"
"The victory was for the kids that go out, play barefoot on the sand, on the ground," he said. "It's for the mother that comes early, early, early in the mornings, grabs her fruit, her vegetables, to go sell in the market. The victory was for that fisherman that has to wake up early in the morning, go risk his life in the ocean just to grab a fish, sell in the market just to feed the family. The victory was for us. Literally, it was for us."
The big and sprawling "us" knew the following June would soar. Las Americas barbershop bubbled with chatter about who's going to which World Cup match in Atlanta, Miami, Houston for matches against (uh-oh) Spain, Uruguay and Saudi Arabia. A sparkling fashion show in a Brockton concert hall featured one model walking the runway dressed as a blue shark. The streets of Pawtucket brimmed with Cabo Verdean red, white and blue on a Sunday afternoon as thousands attended a bustling celebration at the soccer stadium, with traditional dances. "It is about believing that a small island nation with a big heart can achieve extraordinary things," Lomba said in a stadium suite with the team present. Vozinha, the Cabo Verde goalkeeper, made a halting trip across the suite, signing a shoulder, signing a necklace, posing for selfies.
And at the friendly against Bermuda in East Hartford, about 10,000 Cabo Verdean fans rejoiced, in umpteen variations of Cabo Verde football apparel. Many wore shirts with their popular slogan "NO STRESS." Some wore the Red Sox/Cabo Verde combo jersey. At least one person wore a shirt honoring the singer Cesaria Evora, also known as "The Barefoot Diva." Parents brought children. Five guys brought drums.
All along, outside and in, even a novice could have noted an unusual prevalence of people running into people they knew but hadn't seen lately, emblematic of a people among whom people tend to know people. "People that I grew up with, that we went to school with, same neighborhood, that I haven't seen in seven, eight, nine, 12 years," Lopes said. "'You're here!' The fact we were there for our country just made it so much more special. Man, the hugs. You just felt so much warmth ... The smile's just bigger. It's like a huge, huge smile."
Then came something stunning by global soccer terms, after the final whistle at 6:06 p.m. The players made a beautifully slow trek around the edge of the stands as six-deep throngs bunch around to adore them. It continued for an hour and still more, as people handed phones to players for selfies, or tykes to players for photos. A woman asked midfielder Yannick Semedo if he'd climb into the stands for some photos, so he climbed into the stands for some photos. People said thanks. Players said thanks.
As this hour of love finally faded, dark clouds started massing and promising, of all things, rain. But the people kept gathering (and drumming) outside the stadium because metaphorically the rain had come already, in the form of a wow of a World Cup berth that had made being among them feel like an epicenter of wonder.
