As midnight approached on December 31, 2020, Haitians prepared to leave behind one of the most difficult years in recent memory and cross into a new year whose prospects were deeply uncertain but which they faced with the same resilience that had carried them through. New Year’s Eve in Haiti is a major celebration — Reveyon, the night of awakening — and even 2020’s accumulated hardships could not entirely suppress the Haitian impulse to mark the passage of time with music, food, family, and the ritual assertion of hope.
Fireworks filled the sky over Port-au-Prince neighborhoods where they could, and the sounds of music from homes and the few venues that had managed to remain operational mixed with the distant percussion of celebrations in the city’s different quarters. On social media, Haitian voices in Haiti and the diaspora shared reflections on the year that had passed and wishes for what 2021 might bring.
The new year would bring its own devastating challenges — a political crisis that would culminate in the July 2021 assassination of President Moïse, and a devastating earthquake in August. But at midnight on December 31, 2020, none of that was yet known. What was known was that Haiti had survived another year of extraordinary difficulty, and that its people were still here, still celebrating, still refusing to be defined entirely by their hardships.
The Haitian people’s capacity to find joy, to celebrate life, to look toward the future with at least a measure of hope even when the present offered so much cause for despair — that capacity was not a form of denial or delusion. It was a hard-won spiritual achievement, the product of a culture forged in suffering and resistance, and it remained one of Haiti’s most essential resources as it faced whatever the new year would bring.