From The New York Times

Wyclef Jean was in a rare state: nervous. He was trying to stick to his new role of wonky Haitian statesman, but the road kept distracting him. We were driving through Port-au-Prince as dusk fell, and he would interrupt his own discourse on trade rules or egg imports to ask the driver why a fire was burning on the roadside or to complain that our headlights were tempting danger or to mumble that the police escort, which he suspected of working for the opposition, shouldn’t sound its sirens.

It was three days before Haiti’s presidential election, on March 20. Jean, a Haitian-born rapper, producer and star of the now-disbanded Fugees, had mounted his own run for the presidency but was disqualified from the race because he lives in the United States. When I went to Haiti to meet him, he was stumping for Michel Martelly, a musician who goes by the stage name Sweet Micky, has a well-known history of public nudity and has admitted to using crack cocaine. Martelly might have been the candidate, but with Jean performing at many campaign stops and making the longer speeches, it often seemed as if he were the one running. Jean’s role was to revive the support he had garnered during his own campaign and transfer it to a candidate who was a somewhat less famous version of himself. (It worked. Martelly would be inaugurated as president of Haiti in May.)

Martelly sought the presidency; Jean, something more elusive. Before the 2010 earthquake and more loudly since, he has spoken of wanting to save Haiti from its miseries: crime, corruption, cholera, anemic job growth, swarming tent cities, fruitless aid and deep mistrust of the state.

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