Richard Auguste Morse States citizen. His cousin Michel Martelly is a musician, right-wing Haitian politician and former President of Haiti. Richard Morse repeatedly expressed support for Martelly in the 2010 presidential elections in Haiti. By 2014, he had distanced himself from the Martelly government. Richard Auguste Morse was born in Puerto Rico in 1957. His father, Richard M. Morse, was an American academic sociologist and writer, and his mother, Emerante de Pradines (1918-2018), was a famous Haitian singer, as was his maternal grandfather, Auguste de Pradines. The family did not stay in Puerto Rico for long, and Richard grew up in the town
Michel Martelly song, "Prezidan", "an exuberant ditty that called for a president who played compas". At the 1996 Carnival, to which Manno Charlemagne, the mayor of Port-au-Prince, invited him, Martelly dressed in a pink wig and bra. As Martelly explained, it was intended in part as a political statement: "If you see me as a Macoute, then I'm a Macoute. If you see me as gay, I'm gay. What you think of me is no problem, as far as I am concerned. You have the right to think what you want. I know who I am, and that's the main thing." In