Today Haitians are mourning the lost of one of their own. Smarck Michael, who served in the country’s parlament as Prime Minister for a little over a year, after the United States restored President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power in the mid-1990s, died today at age 75.
Smarck Michel, a businessman who served for almost a year as Haiti’s prime minister after the United States restored President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power in the mid-1990s, died Saturday, his son said. He was 75.
Kenneth Michel said his father died away in the family home in a neighborhood above the capital of Port-au-Prince following a brain tumor.
Smarck Michel was born March 29, 1937, in St. Marc, a port city north of the capital, and moved around the country during his childhood because his father was serving in the Haitian armed forces.
Michel attended college in New York, then returned to Haiti in the 1950s to help run the bakery his father had started. He later ran a grocery store in downtown Port-au-Prince.
Michel became prime minister in 1994, one month after a U.S.-led multinational military force restored Aristide to the presidency after three years in exile. Aristide’s first term was cut short in 1991 when the army ousted him in a coup.
