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Puerto Rico’s newly-inaugurated statue of Christopher Columbus, the tallest monument in the Western Hemisphere, has been met with bewilderment, both inside and outside the island.
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The 350-foot statue, about twice as tall as both the Statue of Liberty and Rio’s Christ the Redeemer, was rejected by over half a dozen U.S. cities before being donated to the Organization of American States in 1998.
Despite a petition by the United Confederation of Taino People to stop its installation since “ Columbus is a symbol of Genocide, not a hero to be celebrated,” Puerto Rico went forward with the statue, which was donated but cost US$12 million to install.
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“Puerto Rico was chosen because it is the only U.S. administered territory in the hemisphere where the Italian explorer and his crew actually set foot,” the OAS stated in a press release. The statue “will serve as a reassuring beacon on our journey forward into the new millennium,” said Secretary-General Cesar Gaviria in the statement.
Georgian billionaire Zurab Tsereteli built the monument, named "Birth of a New World," to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage. A second statue, "The Birth of a New Man," was erected in Seville, Spain to mark the point where Columbus started his journey to the Americas. The owner of the property, businessman Jose Gonzalez Freire, accepted that it be built in Arecibo, expecting a rise in 1 million tourists a year.
Unconvinced, many people took to social media to express their disbelief that the statue was erected.
Reporter Hector Luis Alamo tweeted his “kudos ... to the U.S. government for finishing in Puerto Rico what Colon and his imitators started over 500 years ago,” while reporter Nestor David Pastor wrote: “I hope that reject (sic) statue of Christopher Columbus is melted down and sold off to pay for some of Puerto Rico's debt,” which stands at US$72 billion. Assistant Professor Steven Alvarez tweeted that the statue was likely paid with hedge funds.
Historian and radio and TV personality Jesus Omar Rivera Davila launched on a campaign to inform the public about the statue’s factual inaccuracy: the steering wheel, prominent on the 6,500-ton statue, was not invented until over 200 years after Columbus’s voyage.
Rivera Davila, known as “El Boricuazo,” wrote a call to republish his Facebook post to “educate the people” to “show that boricuas, too, are knowledgeable about the topic.”
“Here, we will only focus on the most obvious and striking historical error,” he wrote.
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