Haitian Culture Day Parade & Festival 🇭🇹
NYC’s main Haitian festival
Theme: “We Belong”
Festival Artists: Tabou Combo, Anie Alerte with Band Zile, Colmix, AndyBeatz, Steves J. Bryan
Little Haiti & Little Caribbean, East Flatbush, Brooklyn
May 9, Sat
– Parade, Nostrand Ave at Church Ave, to Hillel Plaza at Flatbush Ave, 10am
– Festival, Flatbush Junction at Plaza, 12pm
FREE with items for purchase
The cover image is actually from Jacmel Carnival in Haiti. Carrying seemingly impossible loads on your head is a signature of Haitian, African, and Diasporic culture. Try it. It’s not easy.
Thanks to Life of Hope (Ayiti Nou La Toujou) and New York City Council Member Rita Joseph of the 40th District for supporting this.
7th Haitian Culture Day Parade 2026
This year’s theme is “We Belong.”
Parade Route
The Parade Route is:
Haitian Culture Day Festival Artists
The Festival is in “The Junction” at Hillel Plaza at Flatbush Avenue at 12 noon.
Invited artists include masters of classic konpa and raboday (Haitian urban):
Haitian Culture is Latin Roots
Inspired by the American and French Revolutions, Haitians founded the second independent nation in the Americas (after us). It’s the most African country in the Americas. Haitians should be celebrated as the only people in history to free themselves and found a nation.
The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) caused Diasporas around the Caribbean, to Dominican Republic, Cuban and Puerto Rico; and as far as Trinidad and New Orleans, which back then was the big American city.
Dominicans and Haitians don’t get along very well now, but many Dominican traditions were originally Haitian traditions. Fast accordion-based Dominican merengue was originally slower guitar-based Haitian méringue. Haitian music has a very Caribbean, West Indian, Antillean sound. A more urban sound shows up in Dominican dembow.
Puerto Rico has great native merengue because of this Diaspora. Some Puerto Rican spiritual traditions are originally Kongo traditions from Haiti.
In Cuba, Havana makes the news, but Cuba’s cultural heartland is Oriente Province in Eastern Cuba around Guantánamo and Santiago de Cuba. That is exactly where the Haitian Diaspora settled. (It was also the land of Cuban Taínos.)
To Cuba, Haitians brought their syncopation and some drum patterns. They influenced changüi in Oriente which became son Cubano in Havana, salsa in New York City, and Latin urban music which now dominates the global airwaves.
By 1810, half of New Orleans was Haitian descent. Around the 1890s, these same African descendents created blues and jazz, the roots of most American popular culture.
Haitians have a lot to be proud of, and I couldn’t agree more with the theme “We Belong.”
PS: Just learned that Haitian Kreyòl isn’t Creole French. It’s a West African Volta-Congo language that borrowed French words. The grammar is Dahomey, the speech rhythms are Kongo, and the vocabulary is French. Wow. We are so mixed.