In the run-up to today's official ceremony in which President, Mireya Moscoso of Panama will take control of the Panama Canal zone, the streets were festooned with large posters of the former president, Omar Torrijos. He was a nationalist dictator and architect of the 1977 Panama Canal Treaty which secured the return of the canal on the last day of 1999.
The US authorities formally handed back the canal last week and have snubbed the New Year's Eve ceremony, requesting that their flag is not be flown at the event to avoid the "humiliation" of seeing it replaced by the Panamanian flag.
In cafes, bus queues and supermarkets, public attention was focused firmly on the canal issue while the millennium hype seemed a distant reality occurring elsewhere.
"The poor, the workers, the teachers, we will never see a single square metre of these returned lands," complained Mr Rogelio Vazquez, a school teacher who supplements his salary by driving a taxi in the evenings. In addition to 110 km of waterways linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the US will return 3,000 hectares of land which had housed US army bases since the canal was built in 1903.
Thousands of Canal zone workers are also dissatisfied with the handover, as Ms Moscoso has announced the streamlining of canal services, cutting back thousands of jobs from Sunday.
In the immaculately-kept former Southern Command HQ located on a hillside above the city centre, a huge clock counted down the hours and minutes to the canal handover. The final days have been charged with political controversy, as Ms Moscoso appointed former president Guillermo Endara to the nation's Supreme Court, despite strident opposition.
Mr Endara is linked to a series of ongoing corruption scandals, linking him to drug-traffickers and the former head of the Chilean secret police, Mr Manuel Contreras. The appointment of Mr Endara was considered an insult to the estimated 2,000 citizens who lost their lives during the US invasion in 1989, during which Mr Endara was sworn in as president at a US military base.
Panama's leading daily, La Prensa, described US-Panama relations as "a shotgun wedding in perpetuity", a metaphor taken up by the Catholic Church in a pastoral letter published this week, in which the historical role of US troops was described as "very similar to situations of women suffering domestic violence". The latest poll on the canal handover revealed that 72 per cent of Panamanians believe that the country is not ready to assume control of the canal and will be unable to protect its borders. Mr Ramiro Vazquez, who led a pro-Torrijos movement in 1958, pointed out that the departing US command had not gone away, but simply shifted operations to Ecuador, Peru and Colombia.