Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola

By Michele Wucker

Like two roosters in a fighting arena, Haiti and the Dominican Republic are encircled by barriers of geography and poverty. They co-inhabit the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, but their histories are as deeply divided as their cultures: one French-speaking and black, one Spanish-speaking and mulatto. Yet, despite their antagonism, the two countries share a national symbol in the rooster--and a fundamental activity and favorite sport in the cockfight. In this book, Michele Wucker asks: "If the symbols that dominate a culture accurately express a nation's character, what kind of a country draws so heavily on images of cockfighting and roosters, birds bred to be aggressive? What does it mean when not one but two countries that are neighbors choose these symbols? Why do the cocks fight, and why do humans watch and glorify them?"

Wucker studies the cockfight ritual in considerable detail, focusing as much on the customs and histories of these two nations as on their contemporary lifestyles and politics. Her well-cited and comprehensive volume also explores the relations of each nation toward the United States, which twice invaded both Haiti (in 1915 and 1994) and the Dominican Republic (in 1916 and 1965) during the twentieth century. Just as the owners of gamecocks contrive battles between their birds as a way of playing out human conflicts, Wucker argues, Haitian and Dominican leaders often stir up nationalist disputes and exaggerate their cultural and racial differences as a way of deflecting other kinds of turmoil. Thus Why the Cocks Fight highlights the factors in Caribbean history that still affect Hispaniola today, including the often contradictory policies of the U.S.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781466867888

Michele Wucker

Michele Wucker is the author of Lockout: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong When Our Prosperity Depends on Getting It Right and Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola. Wucker has been recognized as a 2009 Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum and a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow. She has held positions including president of the New York City-based World Policy Institute; vice president of studies at The Chicago Council on Global Affairs; and Latin America bureau chief at International Financing Review. She has written for The New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and World Policy Journal, among others. She lives in Chicago.

Book preview

chapter 1

Roosters

What the cockfight says it says in a vocabulary of sentiment—the thrill of risk, the despair of loss, the pleasure of triumph. Yet what it says is not merely that risk is exciting, loss depressing, or triumph gratifying, but that it is of these emotions, thus exampled, that society is built and individuals put together.

—Clifford Geertz

Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight

Dangling his dead rooster by its feet, a grizzled cockfighter shuffles out the gate of the Manoguayabo cockfighting club through the parking lot, past a row of obsolete but still working hulks of cars, decrepit versions of old Russian models and American gas-guzzlers. He will have a rich stew tonight, the kind of meal to be eaten with savor and sadness at once. A gallero never wants to have to make dinner from one of his own roosters, but when he does, the meat is the best to be had. After all, a fighting cock has been pampered all its life, fed the best food and exercised daily. Veteran cockers say the adrenaline the fight releases into the bird’s blood and muscles gives the meat a deep, strong taste.

It is early in the evening to have to go home so sad, so early that the old crones who lurk around the gallera in hopes of buying the tasty carcass of a fighting rooster have not yet clustered. The rest of the crowd is only just beginning to filter through the gate, where a sign is posted in misspelled letters, PROHIBIDO ENTRAR CON BEVIDAS, warning patrons not to bring in their own drinks. Inside, the cockfighting fans navigate past an army of small motorcycles, pasolas, on the way to the arena. Smoke from a diesel electric generator hangs heavy over the yard. Today, Santo Domingo has suffered a particularly bad bout of blackouts. There has been no electricity from the bankrupt, broken-down government electricity company since before six this morning. It is after five in the afternoon, just past the normal time when the first fights begin.

Toward the entrance to the ring itself, a dirty cafeteria on the left sells fried plantains and hot dogs. Past the cafeteria, the roosters that have been readied to fight peck impatiently at Plexiglas windows clouded by age and grime. On the near side of the cafeteria, handlers finish preparing birds for the next fight. Seated on rickety, wooden three-legged stools, the men pare the roosters’ spurs and tape on artificial ones made of plastic or tortoiseshell. Some use natural spur that has been cut from the legs of special roosters—called quiquí—bred not to fight but to produce these weapons for other birds. The whole process ensures that all birds go into the fight with weapons of the same length. Combat between cocks is set up to be fair and equal, even if real life is not so.

The slums of Santo Domingo encroach on the countryside in Manoguayabo, this rough barrio on the northwestern edge of the city, and spread past the industrial district of Herrera, all the way to the surrounding sugarcane fields. This is the home of the newest immigrants to the teeming urban capital, coming from rural farms. They wake even before the roosters to catch buses for the long ride to whatever jobs they’ve managed to swing in town.

Dominicans call the Manoguayabo cockfighting arena the bajo mundo, the underworld. The term does not mean clandestine, since fights are legal here. It means lower-class. Money, politics, and power are reserved for the sparkling Alberto Bonetti Burgos Cockfighting Coliseum, closer to town, where the elite go to watch fights among prize cocks meticulously bred for generations and brought to the Dominican Republic from as far away as Spain or even the Philippines. The legendary San Francisco Giants pitcher Juan Marichal fights his roosters at the coliseum.

The netherworld is the cockfighting milieu of people only recently risen up from the countryside, who bring with them gritty determination and their fighting cocks. The fans here are men who haven’t yet made it to the United States. Over three decades a million other Dominicans have left their farms and family to go north to find a better life, their stock phrase. Among the younger generation, which is heavily exposed to American culture, baseball and basketball are taking over from cockfights. In the countryside it is enough for a man that his rooster wins battles for him. But now, so many Dominicans are major-league-baseball stars: Jorge Bell of the Toronto Blue Jays; Juan Marichal, Ozzie Virgil, and the Alou brothers (Felipe, Matty, and Jesús) of the San Francisco Giants; Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs. Young Dominicans dream of becoming baseball stars themselves. Even in the countryside, the poorest Dominican boys practice with bats made of tree branches and balls improvised from the pale-blue plastic caps of giant water bottles.

In the United States, cockfighting is still seen as a backward sport. Nobody remembers that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson fought roosters. The sport is illegal in all states but Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, New Mexico, and Missouri. In Miami and New York City, cockfights are held quietly, in basements and on hidden farms. They are part of a clandestine world, broken up by police from time to time, certainly not a sport where you can dream of fame and millions in earnings.

The entrance fee to the Manoguayabo arena is one hundred Dominican pesos, more than a day’s pay at minimum wage. Lucas, a wiry cocker who today has left his birds at home and is here just to watch a couple of matches and chat with friends, stops at the door. He removes the ammunition cartridge from his gun and leaves the firearm in a yellow wooden bin that is quickly filling up. Lucas is a retired policeman (he owns a colmado, a convenience store that in Dominican life is also a place where locals hang out, play dominoes, exchange stories), so he could carry the weapon if he wanted to.

What do people need to bring guns in here for? he scoffs. The roosters are the ones fighting. Carrying arms in here isn’t necessary and doesn’t make anyone more of a man. If you want to fight, let your rooster win for you. Lucas is one of the few cockers who straddles the bajo mundo and the world of the coliseum, where his skill in training and raising roosters has won him respect.

His roosters are good enough that he has to worry about their being stolen. Just a few months ago, he lost some of his best birds to a gang of robbers who had been stealing the very best cocks in the Dominican Republic. Before they were caught, the thieves had been smuggling the birds across the border to Haiti. Over there, passions for cockfighting are just as high but the birds, everyone here says with conviction, aren’t nearly as good as the Dominican ones. The insult is typical of Dominican sentiment toward Haiti.

At Manoguayabo, the doormen hurry the newcomers in toward their seats to clear an opening for the men who will set up the next fight. Two burly men stride into the green-carpeted arena, which has a diameter the length of three short men lying head to toe and is ringed by a low concrete wall. Each handler carries a canvas sack extended high in front of him to keep a safe distance from the struggling birds inside. The doorway is just wide enough for one at a time, so the spectators must be rushed out of the way. In the three tiers rising above the arena, there is barely enough space to pass through the aisles on the way to plastic seats not really wide enough even for a man as slim as Lucas. Just as the last of the newly arrived fans settle in, the fight begins.

Lucas waves to one owner, who is wearing a pink shirt and sitting ringside a few rows ahead and below along the clean yellow wall keeping the birds in. With a confident smile, the man nods back. I gave him the father of the white rooster, Lucas says. The combatants here are identified in the fight not by their actual color but by the color of the white or blue tape holding their spurs on their legs. The white rooster, in this case actually speckled brown, is old but good. He’s lived four years to the blue rooster’s two. In the coliseum, where the best birds fight, it is rare to see a fight between cocks of such different ages; in principle, everything at a fight is equal—weight, age, length of feathers, size of spurs. Weighing the experience and bloodlines of the older bird against the stamina of the younger, Lucas is not willing to wager on either one. The odds are too tight.

The other players think that the white is old and tired and so they bet accordingly, arms and hands flying as they seek partners. Men jump up and wave their arms, holding up fingers to show the odds. I pay one hundred to twenty means the gambler gets a hundred pesos if his bird wins but only has to pay twenty if his bird loses. The betting is cacophony, but the players are eloquent in this language. They zero in on a likely partner, make eye contact, flash the bet through shouts and gestures. At the end of the game, they pay promptly. As the match progresses, the odds keep dropping, from seventy to fifty, against the white. But it keeps fighting, on and on, the clock ticking five, ten, fifteen minutes. The young blue can’t overcome its older opponent, even after the white bird is blinded and staggers around, lunging by instinct