AOL News Report - Goodbye 'Sweet Micky'? Martelly Serious About Leading Haiti

   Apr 10, 2011 – 6:45 AM

Emily TroutmanContributor

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- On the Sunday night before the announcement of Haiti's preliminary election results, tensions ran high. The candidates faced a troubled electoral system, an impatient population, the never-ending sense that what can go wrong, will.


At 9 p.m., hip-hop star Pras Michel took to Twitter:


RT @PrasMichel Machete + gasoline + matches = the will of people


Pras is an internationally known musician, the cousin and former Fugees band mate of Wyclef Jean, and he was one of the first to endorse Michel Martelly.

Emily Troutman for AOL News

Michel Martelly, the musician known as "Sweet Micky," is the new president-elect of Haiti.

The Haiti-focused twittersphere, small though it is, erupted in condemnation, interpreting his message as a call to violence. Fans of Wyclef and Martelly immediately threw back retorts, calling him a "moron" and "immature."

Some tagged their responses with frustration,#merde; anger, #yousuck;and social consciousness,#noviolence.

In a stream of apologetic responses, Pras said his tweet was meant as "a preventative statement and not an aggressive motive." But the damage was done.

On Monday, results were announced and Martelly swept the polls, garnering 67 percent of the vote. No violence or tire burning erupted. At Martelly's house, friends and supporters gathered to celebrate the sweet reward for their hard work.

Who wasn't invited? Pras. The star was not allowed in.

He's More Like "The Body" Than "The Gipper"

It's fitting that Martelly's first presidential censure took place in the new margin of Haitian politics, where music, social media and celebrity overlap. Martelly rose to stardom as the wily carnival star "Sweet Micky" and, on many counts, his campaign succeeded by leveraging stardom in all the right ways.

Many compare his foray into politics to that of American movie star Ronald Reagan. But in context and competency, Martelly more closely resembles wrestler-turned-governor Jesse "The Body" Ventura.

Ventura served as governor of Minnesota from 1999 to 2003 and as a veteran, projected the right combination of get-tough, straight-talk politics to land the state's top job. Ventura ran under the Reform Party. At the time -- young voters especially -- were fed up with the better known but stodgy Republican Norm Coleman and legacy Democrat Hubert H. "Skip" Humphrey III.

Martelly attended military academy as a young man, though he was tossed out. The socially conscious lyrics of his songs combined with vicious trash-talk toward his musical "frenemies" left little doubt among Haitians that he's a force to be reckoned with.

After Ventura took office, Minnesotans often sported goofy T-shirts with pictures of the uber macho wrestling star and the slogan, "My governor can beat up your governor." Here, too, Martelly's meteoric popularity was attended with his unique brand of counter-culture, highlighted in his trademark pink.

Voters wore pink bracelets and T-shirts with his caricature. His slogan, the phrase "Tet kale!" means "bald head." It also means "No sweat!" and has a third, slang meaning with a sexual connotation.

In campaign speeches, Martelly promised if audience members didn't vote for him, he would come back to town on his float and curse them all. He made fun of his opponents and increasingly fine-tuned his plainspoken everyman shtick, which seemed both contrived and authentic in equal measure.

In November, Martelly told AOL News that "Sweet Micky" was just a public persona; "That was the business. Sweet Micky was the store." But voters seemed hopeful that's not true.

Haitian Voters Want Change

"Our vote was a response to the current regime," one voter said. "We need a new era. We need change."

Patricia, 47, who sells chicken, said, "I want security. I want to walk in the street. I never voted before in my life but I voted for Martelly. To see change."

He was labeled a cowboy, bad boy, outsider, maverick, vagabond and rebel. For many, especially older women and conservative Christian voters, it was all a bit much. They were wooed away by Martelly's opponent, Mirlande Manigat.

Martelly never quite swayed all of the educated class, who were unimpressed by his lack of technical knowledge. Others were offended that he failed to try harder to woo them. During his campaign, he went for the masses and seemed to encourage the over-charged cult of personality. But even among the nervous, he won votes.

"I don't know, I just thought, [screw] it," a voter said. "It's like Manigat needed a reason to get people to vote for her. Her reason was, 'I'm smart.' And that wasn't enough."

Martelly was the high-risk vote, but his audacity made him the best chance at a high reward.

Much has been made of Martelly's past, not just in music, but especially in his past friendship with Michel Francois, a former police chief who helped orchestrate a coup against former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Martelly's politics are known as "center right" here, and the vote against the status quo seemed to signal a departure.

Like all well-known crossovers -- Reagan, Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger -- Martelly is less of an "outsider" than his antics imply. Ventura himself was a mayor in Minnesota before he ran. Martelly first floated the idea of becoming president 20 years ago.

When asked this week at a press conference how he would deal with former presidents Jean-Claude Duvalier and Aristide, who are now back in Haiti, he responded, "I am president of all the Haitians."

It harkened back to his decades-old statements about Francois and entertaining controversial figures at his nightclub. In 1997, he told the Miami Herald, "I am a musician. I play for people who pay to get in."

He Was Political as a Performer

It's likely Martelly was successful in music because he is actually a politician, rather than a musician who stumbled into politics. At the very least, his stardom was a practice in power.

"Since I was a kid, even if I was the youngest one in the crowd, I would be the entertainer," he told AOL News. "I would be the one calling the shots. I would be the one everybody would focus on."

Music in Haiti, even more so than other forms of art around the world, is a deeply unifying cultural force. His stardom gave him rare agency in a culture with intricate class boundaries.

"I have a better Ph.D. than people who went to school. I have studied the complexity of this society for 22 years," he said.

Speaking about his past, he said, "The rich come here, I play at their wedding. I get inside their house. I do as I please. I get inside their business. I open their safe. I take as much money as I want -- I'm serious. I close the safe, I go to the poor and I give that money. And there was no limit for me in this country."

His campaign was heavily financed by Laurent Lamothe, a Miami-based business associate in international telecommunications.

Martelly has had "proximity" -- as he called it -- to the "rich," but that term is relative here. Haiti once had booming tourism and apparel industries, but has been in steady decline for decades.

"They should call us the broke-ass elite," one business owner said.

Haiti has one of the highest disparities between the haves and the have-nots, but it also has a lower gross domestic product than most countries; lower than Tajikistan, Yemen, or Equatorial Guinea.

Despite U.S. legislation that allowed duty-free apparel exports since 2006, 20 percent of the country's GDP is remittances from abroad, more than twice the earnings of all exports.

"A lot of people have been in power and don't do anything," said Jean Cenor, a cobbler. "We need someone new to take this power and help us."

Celebrity Alone Won't Be Enough

Ventura eventually drew ire for cashing in on a book deal while in office, but such offers aren't likely to appear for Martelly in Haiti, where the cache of celebrity is more limited.

During the campaign, he leveraged his local renown by bringing in bigger fish: Wyclef to harness the Haitian vote, and Sean Penn to lend legitimacy in the international aid community.

Development professionals and donors who visited Martelly over the past months often left charmed and star-struck. Both Penn and Wyclef were spotted at the post-election party at Martelly's house.

Some inside his circle were pleased that Pras was not there.

I was happy because a lot of people think Michel will allow his friends to do whatever they want during his term," one party-goer said. "His decision to keep Pras away because of his tweet proves to me that will not be the case."

But for most of Haiti, and the world, for those who weren't invited to the party, the "gasoline + matches" incident was of little note. Who is Pras? And what is Twitter? Martelly will eventually face much bigger battles.

"People will try to hold you down," said Olita Reneleus, 26, a shopkeeper and voter with a word of advice. "There is evil around. You've got to fight a lot. Face a lot of bad stuff. You have to keep your head clear, straight. Come to us. Come back to the people when you need our help."

For his first post-election press conference, Martelly abandoned his old décor in favor of the more stately red and blue. But close observers noted his pale pink shirt. On Twitter at least, he

plans to stay @PresidentMicky

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