Port-au-Prince in 2019 was a city of extraordinary contradictions: a sprawling, chaotic, creative, dangerous, beautiful, heartbreaking metropolis of several million people that refused to be defined by the crises that periodically convulsed it. Even at the height of the lockdowns and protests, the city pulsed with life — with music coming from open windows, children playing in alleys, vendors improvising new strategies, artists creating new works.
The city’s geography reflected its inequalities with brutal honesty. In the hillside suburbs of Pétion-Ville, gated houses with swimming pools and armed guards sat minutes from the dense popular neighborhoods below, where families of ten shared two-room concrete homes and water came from a tap — when there was a tap, and when there was water. The contrast was visible, daily, and understood by everyone who lived it.
Yet Port-au-Prince was also a city of genuine community, creativity, and culture. Its art galleries displayed works of international caliber. Its restaurants served cuisine that could hold its own anywhere in the Caribbean. Its streets were a permanent gallery of tap-tap art and wall murals. Its informal economy displayed a resourcefulness that economists struggled to fully account for.
Amid the crisis of 2019, the city’s residents did what they had always done: they endured, they adapted, they helped their neighbors, and they kept moving. Port-au-Prince was battered but unbroken — a city that embodied Haiti’s most essential quality: the refusal to give up.