Holidays in Haiti

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Haiti

Haiti's Own Year One

When Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed independence at Gonaïves on 1 January 1804, the document his secretary Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre drafted was dated not simply to the Gregorian calendar but to "the first year of independence," a phrase placed prominently ahead of the more familiar date. Research into the surviving texts has found that this was not, as might be assumed, a borrowing from the revolutionary calendar France itself had briefly used in the 1790s. It was closer to the opposite: a deliberate break from the dating conventions of the colonial power, replacing any trace of a French revolutionary or royal calendar with a chronology that began the moment slavery ended on the island.

The practice proved remarkably durable. Constitutions issued in the years that followed, including a revision published in 1816, carried the double dating in their titles, that one identifying itself as belonging to the thirteenth year of independence alongside its Gregorian year. According to research into the surviving official record, the parallel calendar did not fade out after a decade or two, nor did it end with the first United States occupation of the country between 1915 and 1934; government correspondence, constitutional texts and newspapers continued counting years of independence alongside the ordinary calendar for generations after the declaration that started it.

Port-au-Prince Kept Its Own Minute

Before the country settled onto the same clock as its neighbours to the north, the capital ran on a time zone of its own devising, drawn directly from its geographic position rather than from any international agreement. Technical records used to build the modern IANA time zone database show Port-au-Prince operating on local mean solar time, essentially the time read directly from the sun's position over the city, until 1890, when this was formalised into a fixed offset of four hours and forty-nine minutes behind Greenwich, sometimes referred to in the surviving records simply as Port-au-Prince Mean Time. That arrangement lasted until noon on 24 January 1917, when the country moved its clocks onto the round five-hour offset shared with the United States' Eastern time zone, a shift that brought Haitian timekeeping into line with its largest trading partner just as many other nations were standardising their own clocks in the years around the First World War.

A Country That Still Cannot Decide About Summer

Long after the clock itself was settled, the question of whether to observe daylight saving each year has remained anything but. The country tried the seasonal changeover for the first time in 1983, then adjusted, abandoned and restarted the practice on a schedule irregular enough that the technical maintainers of the world's time zone database have had to revise their records for Haiti more often than for almost any other country in the hemisphere. Clock changes ran through most of the 1980s and 1990s, stopped entirely for several years around the turn of the millennium, briefly returned in 2005 and 2006 by government decree, resumed again from 2012 to 2015, and were then cancelled outright in 2016, an announcement issued to the public only two days before the shift was due to take place.

The following year the practice was reinstated again just as abruptly, with several independent reports confirming clocks had moved forward on the appointed March Sunday only after the fact, since no advance official notice had reached the international time zone maintainers keeping track of such changes worldwide. The pattern has continued since, with the government's decision typically announced by administrative notice rather than fixed into permanent law, leaving businesses, airlines and the country's own diaspora abroad to check each spring and autumn rather than assume the previous year's rule still applies.

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