Michael Madsen; brewer & politician
Hyfler/Rosner
Politician and brewery founder
The Independent
19 May 2007
Phil Davison
Michael Madsen, brewer and politician: born Port-au-Prince
27 August 1942; (two daughters, one adopted son); died
Kenscoff, Haiti 24 March 2007.
Michael Madsen was one of the wealthiest, and therefore most
powerful, men in Haiti long before he went into politics by
founding the Parti Libéral d'Haiti (Haitian Liberal Party)
in 2004. He will, however, be remembered by his countrymen
for something he founded 30 years earlier, the Brasserie
Nationale d'Haiti - the Haitian National Brewery - which
gave their rum-swigging nation its own national beer,
Prestige, for the first time.
Madsen was a member of one of Haiti's half-dozen richest
families, the small white or mixed-race élite of European or
Middle Eastern origin that effectively run the poorest
nation in the western hemisphere, where 95 percent are black
descendants of African slaves. He was third-generation
Haitian but was what Haitians call "un blanc", a pure white
man, grandson of a Danish entrepreneur who arrived in Haiti
in 1889 in the hope of cashing in on its sugar crop and on
labour so cheap it was not far off slavery. More than a
century later, that has changed little.
While fellow businessmen eulogised Madsen as a "visionary"
notably for founding the Brasserie Nationale d'Haiti (known
as Brana), human-rights groups accused him of running sweat
shops and refusing to pay workers even the minimum wage, in
itself a pittance - less than a dollar a day. In the last
few years, his brewery workers had organised themselves into
a trade union, Batay Ouvriye ("Workers Battle", in the local
French-Creole), threatening strikes if he did not improve
their conditions. When two of the workers were detained and
beaten up by police in 2003, the case drew criticism from
human-rights groups around the world.
Madsen came under attack more recently from Haitian women's
groups, who described a series of ads for Prestige as
"blatantly sexist" and called on their countrymen to boycott
the beer. The ads showed the rear of what is apparently a
curvaceous Haitian woman, clad in the flimsiest of bikinis,
standing in ocean shallows and holding a cold Prestige can
to her thigh.
Madsen's critics also pointed to his family's
live-and-let-live relationship with the brutal Duvalier
dynasty - first François "Papa Doc" and later his son
Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" - and to the lavish parties he was
renowned for throwing in his luxury home above the Haitian
capital, Port-au-Prince. The warehouses of his companies
were among the first to be looted when people took to the
streets of Port-au-Prince to celebrate Baby Doc's overthrow
in February 1986.
While Madsen's workers and human-rights groups attacked him,
his friends and fellow businessmen said he brought badly
needed jobs to starving Haitians and was a vital sponsor of
Haiti's national football squad and other sportsmen and
women. It was his influence, and cash, that brought the
Brazilian footballer Pelé to Haiti for a series of
exhibition matches a few years ago.
Following his long-standing philosophy that only the wealthy
and educated top families in Haiti could properly lead the
nation forward, Madsen founded the Parti Libéral d'Haiti in
2004, shortly after the overthrow of President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide. Its aim, he said, was to give a greater voice to
the private sector (though, in reality, the private sector
has long been the most powerful voice of all in Haiti) and
promote a liberal free-market economy.
The party was, and remains, merely a handful of businessmen
with no popular base. It did not waste its time fielding a
candidate in last year's presidential election, which was
won by René Préval.
Like most of the wealthy business families, Madsen had long
opposed Aristide, the fiery former Catholic priest whose
power-base was among the impoverished. He was thought to
have supported the military coup which first ousted Aristide
in 1991, as well as the smoke-and-mirrors coup which saw the
diminutive president frogmarched to Port-au-Prince airport
by US Marines in February 2004.
When anti-Aristide rebels drove into the capital a few hours
later, Madsen greeted them with an unlimited supply of
Prestige beer, although most of them looked as though they
had already had enough.
Michael Madsen was born in Port-au-Prince in 1942. He was
sent to school in France and later studied at Georgetown
University in Washington, DC, before returning to Haiti in
his late twenties to join the family firm. In 1973, noting
the rising success of the local Red Stripe beer in Jamaica,
which had begun outselling the traditional British and US
imports, Madsen consulted Red Stripe's owners, Peter Desnoes
and Paul Geddes, and drew up a business plan. Impoverished
Haitians traditionally drank their renowned Barbancourt rum
and could not afford imported beers. Madsen saw his chance.
With the backing of the two Jamaicans, he founded the
Brasserie Nationale d'Haiti.
Before that, Haitians, mainly the well-off, drank only
30,000 cases of beer a year, all of it imported from Europe
or the United States. By the time Madsen died, Prestige
accounted for 98 per cent of the one and a half million
cases being consumed in Haiti annually. Having launched the
beer on the US market in 2004, he was hoping to launch it in
Britain and the rest of Europe with a unique image based on
his country's reputation for poverty and violence. As one
beer critic wrote:
While Corona and Red Stripe evoke images of kicking back in
a friendly, quasi-primitive paradise, Prestige only makes
you wonder: could I drink this on a beach in Haiti without
getting robbed or shot? In other words . . . Prestige is for
those who live on the edge.
Phil Davison