Opinion | What Is a Statue of Columbus Doing in Puerto Rico? | CPT PPP Coverage

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The idea that Christopher Columbus should be memorialized this way dates to a time when the mood around his legacy was very different. In 1923, a Pan-American conference concluded that “a monument has not yet been erected in America to perpetuate the collective sentiment of gratitude, admiration and thanksgiving toward Christopher Columbus, discoverer of America and benefactor of humanity.” An international design competition followed, with Frank Lloyd Wright among the judges.

To raise money, the Dominican leader Rafael Trujillo, a dictator obsessed with whiteness, organized, with Cuba, an airplane tour of every country in Latin America in 1937. There were four planes: the Niña, the Pinta, the Santa Maria, and one named after Columbus. Three of the planes crashed, killing everyone onboard, and the tour was never finished, but you can still find pro-Faro postage stamps online.

Decades later, in the 1980s, President Joaquin Balaguer resuscitated the plans, even though by then there was no more “collective sentiment of gratitude, admiration and thanksgiving” about Columbus. The project was not only hugely unpopular in the country, it was also shunned by world leaders: The pope celebrated Mass at the lighthouse a day before the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World, and the king and queen of Spain didn’t even show up. The Washington Post reported that Dominicans didn’t want to say Columbus’s full name in Spanish because they believed it is cursed (even now, I won’t take the risk of saying it in Spanish).

My family lived in the Dominican Republic while this thing was being erected in the late ’80s and early ’90s. There was a sense then that this project was sucking things — electricity, concrete, money, effort — into itself like a vortex. The Dominican government didn’t disclose how much it spent on construction, but it was estimated to have cost $70 million. Thousands of people were displaced to make room for it. The fact that it’s dusty and does not attract large crowds doesn’t make that history easier to swallow.

Last January in San Juan, the king of Spain came to mark the 500th anniversary of the city’s founding. That morning, a statue of the Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León in Old San Juan was toppled and damaged. I first saw the news through Puerto Rico’s world-class memes of figures like Iris Chacon and Bad Bunny, who some considered more deserving of celebration than the figure standing on the pedestal. There was even a petition to replace it with one of the Taino cacique Agüeybaná.