Before Michel Martelly was the President, he was Sweet Micky, a popular singer. Photograph by Philip Montgomery for The New Yorker

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.”

Martelly’s Presidency has been predicated on rebuilding. He took office a year after the January, 2010, earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince, killing perhaps two hundred thousand people and leaving millions homeless. The disaster drew the world’s attention to Haiti’s long struggle—and, to some extent, offered a chance for a fresh start. In a survey of American voters, more than half reported donating to help repair the country; Bill Clinton, whose family foundation is deeply involved in Haiti, announced the hope that it could “build back better.” But Delmas, like much of Port-au-Prince, has been at best partly repaired. Even as the new overpass was unveiled, tens of thousands of residents were still displaced. As Martelly finishes his term in office, Haiti remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Some sixty per cent of its ten million citizens live in poverty. Nearly half are illiterate, and only one in four has access to a toilet.

On the road below the overpass, a stage had been set up. It was the final day of campaigning for forthcoming elections, and Martelly was throwing a concert to give one last push to his political organization, the Tèt Kale (Bald Head) Party. Several thousand young people had gathered before a police cordon, and for five hours, as bands came and left, Martelly served as the master of ceremonies. From the stage, he encouraged his officials to get loose and have a good time. The minister of public works, Jacques Rousseau, danced with increasing abandon; finally, in homage to his boss, he pulled down one side of his shirt to lick an imaginary breast. As the crowd warmed up, Martelly crouched on the edge of the stage, growling into the microphone. “You want me to take off my pants?” he said. “I know that’s why you’ve come. You want me to?” As people yelled “Oui!,” he laughed, turned his back, and gave an insouciant waggle.

It is not unusual for a politician to be a showman, but Martelly’s survival has depended on managing his audiences with exceptional adroitness. A member of the country’s light-skinned élite, he has been repeatedly accused of enriching himself in office. Opponents claim that he has consorted with kidnappers, murderers, and drug dealers, and that members of his family are corrupt. Martelly has blithely carried on, alternating between his Presidential duties and appearances as Sweet Micky. The United States has offered steady support, interrupted by an occasional scolding for his worst scandals.

In public, Martelly still urges his citizens to make Haiti a place of progress and prosperity—a message of self-reliance that is both an acknowledgment that the world has stopped caring and a defense of his administration’s failings. In Delmas, he told the audience, “All I ever hear is that Haiti is a dump, Haiti is corrupt, and Haitians can’t do anything for themselves. But we are doing some things for ourselves!” As the crowd shouted in agreement, he said, “Haiti is a country with a few rich people and a lot of others who live in the shit.” He pointed up toward the hills around town, where the wealthy live, and where his house is situated. “I could be with them,” he said. “But I am not. I am here, with the Haiti that lives in the shit.”

In “The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster,” the journalist Jonathan M. Katz writes, “It’s not that politicians in Haiti are more venal, petty or brutal than elsewhere; it’s just that, too often, that’s all there is to them.” Haiti’s political life has always been volatile. In 1971, François Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, died in office after fourteen years of brutal rule. His son, Jean-Claude, or Baby Doc, succeeded him; he was only nineteen, but parliament had accommodated him by lowering the minimum age for high office. In 1986, amid growing unrest, a popular uprising forced Baby Doc into exile. Haiti’s long dictatorship was over, but the following decades were plagued by repression, corruption, and political violence. In 1991, Jean-Bertrand Aristide—a charismatic priest from the slums with socialist leanings—became President, and his administration was twice interrupted by coups. The U.S. invaded in 1994, hoping to enforce stability, and ten years later the U.N. sent in peacekeeping troops.

After Secretary of State Hillary Clinton heard the news of the earthquake, she exclaimed, “Why Haiti?” An earthquake seemed like a gratuitous insult to a place that had already suffered so much. When I visited, in the immediate aftermath, there were foreigners at work everywhere: U.S. military planes flying in emergency supplies; U.N. peacekeepers patrolling in armored personnel carriers; teams from Israel, Cuba, France, and a dozen other countries, distributing food and providing medical care. At a clinic set up in a neighborhood school, I watched American doctors amputate groggy patients’ injured feet and hands, tossing them into plastic buckets. At the city’s main hospital, Bill Clinton strolled past the injured, smiling broadly, with the CNN doctor Sanjay Gupta at his side.





1 / 12 Chevron Chevron Philip Montgomery for The New Yorker Residents of Wharf Jérémie, a slum in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, congregate on a hillside to catch a glimpse of President Michel Martelly as he tours the site. Before being elected President, in 2011, Martelly was Sweet Micky, an extroverted singer of the ebullient dance music called konpa. September 2, 2015.

Yet all this well-intentioned activity barely diminished the tragedy. Victims lay trapped under rubble, and survivors walked wordlessly around the shattered capital, looking for food and water, or for help rescuing their loved ones or burying their dead. Prisoners who had escaped from the damaged National Penitentiary roamed the city center, and police executed suspected criminals in broad daylight. Less than a hundred yards from the gate of a primary U.N. depot, I saw the body of a man who had been tied to a pole and beaten to death for wandering into the wrong encampment of displaced people. As the country struggled to rebuild, cholera broke out, eventually infecting some seven hundred thousand Haitians. It was traced to a contingent of U.N. peacekeepers from Nepal. The Haitians themselves seemed more than ever reduced to passive onlookers. When I asked René Préval, the President at the time, about the response, he told me that the earthquake wasn’t his fault.