News Information

• NEWS_POSTED_BY: Haiti Place
• NEWS_POSTED_ON: Jan 29, 2016
• Views : 2017
• Category : General News
• Description : The New Yorker
  February 1, 2016 Issue
  
  Is the earthquake-stricken country’s flamboyant President a savior or a rogue?
  
  BY JON LEE ANDERSON
  
  Photo: Before Michel Martelly was the President, he was Sweet Micky, a popular singer.
  CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY PHILIP MONTGOMERY FOR THE NEW YORKER
• Location : Haiti
• Website : http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/01/aftershocks-letter-from-haiti-jon-lee-anderson

Overview

• A few months ago, a crowd of curious onlookers gathered on a newly built highway overpass in downtown Port-au-Prince. It was a humid afternoon, too hot to linger outside, but Haiti’s President, Michel Martelly, was scheduled to appear, and any appearance by Martelly was bound to be entertaining. Before being elected President, in 2011, Martelly was Sweet Micky, an extroverted singer of the ebullient dance music called konpa. A popular and bawdy showman, he appears in one typical video clip in a night club, dancing for the camera in a red bra and a yellow sarong. At one point, he feigns masturbating a giant phallus, then hoists an imaginary breast and licks it.
  
  At the overpass, jeeploads of riot police fanned out, and workmen set up a red carpet and a lectern with the Presidential seal on it. Martelly was coming to inaugurate the Delmas Viaduct, a four-lane bridge over a deep gully at the base of Delmas, a densely populated hillside neighborhood. As the crowd grew, a rara band, a squad of dreadlocked teen-agers, showed up to blow horns and beat drums. Martelly, who is fifty-four, arrived in a pink-and-white checked shirt worn untucked over black jeans. His shaved head gleaming, he cut a casually hip figure amid an entourage of plainclothes bodyguards and officials in suits. At the microphone, he spoke in guttural Creole, a French patois that is Haiti’s primary language. “This viaduct proves once again that together we can achieve great and beautiful things,” he said. “More than a dream, more than a project, this viaduct is now one of the symbols of Port-au-Prince.”
  
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