In recent years, Haiti’s ex-president Michel Martelly, also known as the musician “Sweet Micky,” has participated in Brooklyn’s annual West Indian Day Parade on Labor Day, thereby limiting our enjoyment and full participation in the celebration. The legacy of his corrupt, reactionary, and repressive government, insults and attacks on women, foul language and antics, and aggressive intolerance towards people who dare question his behavior make his participation as a representative of Haitian culture an outrage. His presence again this year is intolerable and even constitutes a danger for people’s safety.
While young girls and women in Haiti have been raped by gangs, Sweet Micky openly brags about his affiliation with these gangs, which he called “bandit legal” (legal gangsters).
Furthermore, Martelly’s government stole most of the money from the $2 billion “PetroCaribe Fund,” thereby greatly increasing the Haitian people’s misery and poverty. He is even credibly accused of poisoning a judge investigating his corruption. We, members of New York’s Haitian-American community, are raising our voices to say: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!
Martelly should be in a courtroom or jail cell for his government’s plundering of the PetroCaribe Fund.
Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly should be in a courtroom or jail cell for his government’s plundering of the PetroCaribe Fund. He has made violent, misogynist insults and threats against one of Haiti’s leading journalists, Liliane Pierre-Paul. He boasts of having been a card-carrying Tonton Macoute, as the Duvalier dictatorship’s henchmen were called.
We will not endure Martelly’s litany of obscenities on Labor Day this year.
We will not idly stand by and let Sweet Micky continue to insult women.
We say no to his sexist message and promotion of sexual abuse, rape, and even murder of women.
We will not expose our children to the filth he spreads.
Michel Martelly should not, cannot represent the Haitian people in the West Indian Day Parade.
We do not deserve that. We are better than that.
No to Michel Martelly in the West Indian Parade Labor Day 2019.
Michelle Daniel is a member of the Brooklyn-based Haitian Coalition to Support the Struggle in Haiti (KAKOLA).
