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2021 Te Faro a Colón in : Reinterpreting a “More Nearly Perfect” Memorial to

Mairi Cowan and Christoph Richter

Important Notes © Te Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History Tis journal article was made available to read in accordance with the publishing agreement.

Citation (Chicago Manual of Style 17th ed.): Cowan, Mairi and Christoph Richter. “Te Faro a Colón in Santo Domingo: Reinterpreting a “More Nearly Perfect” Memorial to Christopher Columbus.” Te Public Historian 43, no. 2 (May 2021): 63-80.

Visit Publisher’s Site for the VoR: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2021.43.2.63 The Faro a Colon´ in Santo Domingo

Reinterpreting a “More Nearly Perfect” Memorial to Christopher Columbus

Mairi Cowan and Christoph Richter Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/tph/article-pdf/43/2/63/461638/tph.2021.43.2.63.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 May 2021

ABSTRACT: The “Faro a Colon,”´ or “Columbus Lighthouse,” is perhaps the largest memorial to Christopher Columbus in the world. Inaugurated in 1992 as a celebration of the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s first arrival in the , it is visible throughout much of Santo Domingo, . This article argues that the typical presentation of the monument is badly misaligned with the historical record, but that a historically and historiographically informed interpretation can lead to a truer understanding of the violence and greed of colonization. Contrary to what its designers wanted to show about Columbus, and in some ways in spite of itself, the Columbus Lighthouse conveys with unusual clarity the problems of memorializing one of the most (in)famous figures in world history.

KEY WORDS: Christopher Columbus, memorial, Caribbean, Dominican Republic, colo- nization, historiography, teaching

The politics of public memory have become focused on historical monuments. Debate rages over what to do with memorials to Confederate soldiers in the , schools named after prime ministers in Canada, and statues of imperial explorers in England. Simplistic accusations about attempts to “erase the past” test the patience of historians who are trying to help people understand the complex- ities of history, and disputes heat up about whether monuments should be removed, altered, or left exactly as they are. The forty-fifth president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, declared in September 2020 that he would establish a national commission to promote patriotic education and a National Garden of American Heroes. Meanwhile, in both the US and abroad, groups of citizens have started taking matters into their own hands to protest or remove monuments that do not represent the values of our own time. Statues of King Leopold II, the brutal colonizing king of Belgium, Edward Colston, a slave trader in Bristol, and Chris- topher Columbus, the so-called “Discoverer of America,” are being torn down, defaced, and thrown into the sea.

THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN, Vol. 43,No.2,pp.63–80 (May 2021). ISSN: 0272-3433,electronicISSN 1533-8576. © 2021 by The Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2021.43.2.63.

63 Now imagine a historical monument that is the size of several city blocks, visible for kilometers, and tied up in the painful knots of nineteenth-century pride, twentieth-century tyranny, and twenty-first century apathy. This is the Faro a Colon,´ the “Columbus Lighthouse” in Santo Domingo. Inaugurated in 1992 to celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the Americas, the Faro looms in hulking silence on a hill overlooking the Caribbean’s biggest metropolis and capital of the Dominican Republic. Today, it is neither celebrated nor protested. Mostly, it is ignored. The Faro’s history has brought it to a strange place among historical commem- Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/tph/article-pdf/43/2/63/461638/tph.2021.43.2.63.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 May 2021 orations. Not really a lighthouse by most standards, nor what most people would probably think of as a monument, it calls out for an interpretation that is informed both by the history of Columbus’s voyage and by the historiography of the Columbian legacy. The ideals behind the Faro’s original design and its current presentation by the Ministry of Tourism in the Dominican Republic are badly misaligned with the historical record of colonization in the Americas. And yet, in a strange way, it is possible to understand this Columbus Lighthouse as conveying with unusual clarity the problems of memorializing one of the most famous and infamous figures in world history. In contrast to what its designers, builders, and supporters hoped for in their celebration of a heroic discoverer, the Faro a Colon´ should be seen as one of the truest memorials to Christopher Columbus’s real legacy of pain and devastation.

The Lighthouse Today The Faro as a building is not so much imposing as oppressive. One measure is its physical dimensions. Sources report that the main building is either 700 feet long and seven stories high,1 800 feet long and 150 feet high,2 2,195 feet long and 104 feet high,3 or half a mile long and ten stories high.4 Although precise measurements of its size are elusive, simply put, it’s very big. From up close, you cannot see the whole thing at once. If you walk around its exterior, you will find that it is shaped like a cross lying on the ground. Carved into its sides are the names of countries in the Americas, quotations from ancient authors that purport to show either the value of exploration or the existence of an unexplored hemisphere, and many more crosses. Anyone wanting to go inside the Faro can pay 100 pesos (about $1.70) for a ticket. The air within is still and dusty. A long corridor facing the entrance is open to the

1 Manuel Jimenez, “They Threw a Party to Celebrate Columbus, But Nobody Came,” Chicago Tribune, October 9, 1992. 2 Colin Harding, “Rocky Course for Lighthouse in Eye of Storm,” Independent, October 7, 1992. 3 Douglas Farah, “Curse of Columbus? President Misses Dominican Celebrations,” Washington Post, October 7, 1992. 4 Solomon J. Greene, “Staged Cities: Mega-Events, Slum Clearance, and Global Capital,” Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal 6 (January, 2003): 161–88; “What Price Columbus?” Washington Post, September 28, 1992.

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Exterior view of the Faro a Colon,´ as seen from the north. (Photo by authors)

Interior corridor of the Faro a Colon´ facing east with doorways to small exhibit rooms. (Photo by authors)

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The tomb at the crossing of the Faro a Colon.´ (Photo by authors) sky, yet still feels confined. Along the sides are rooms set up like radiating chapels and filled with items donated from various countries. Some contain objects linked to early trans-Atlantic contact; others display a seemingly random selection of historical artifacts with no connection to Columbus or the modern Caribbean. At the place where the arms of the cross intersect—the architectural (if not geometrical) centre of the building—Dominican soldiers guard an elaborate marble tomb. It is very ornate, very nineteenth-century neo-gothic, very exuberant in gilded Latin inscriptions praising the man whose mortal remains are supposedly contained within: Christopher Columbus. As is probably obvious by now, the Faro is not really a lighthouse in any conven- tional sense. Lying prone on the ground, it certainly does not look like a typical lighthouse, and at more than a kilometer from shore, its location is not particularly useful for guiding ships. It does emit light, or at least, it can. It is equipped with 149 lights to project beams in the shape of a cross into the sky so powerfully that they can be seen all the way to , almost three hundred kilometers away. Surrounding the building is a large landscaped area that might be called a park. It is windblown and dry, with an unkempt look of abandonment. Grass withers in the

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Detail of the tomb. (Photo by authors)

Detail of the tomb. (Photo by authors)

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The tomb at the crossing of the Faro a Colon.´ (Photo by authors) sun, and a few scraggly trees brow aridly in the wind. The parking lot is mostly empty. Inside and out, the site of the Faro a Colon´ is practically deserted aside from the soldiers who guard it, a very few tourists, and, when wind conditions are right, some locals flying their kites. Overall, the atmosphere is one of desolation and neglect even after considerable investment by the Dominican Republic’s government. A substantial refurbishment was undertaken in 2018 to clean up the buidling and grounds ahead of the Special Olympics World Tennis Invitational Tournament, held in a nearby park and spon- sored by the Dominican Republic’s First Lady.5 Diogenes´ Gonzalez,´ governor of the Faro a Colon,´ tried to alleviate concerns at the time about safety on the site, saying a few days before the start of the event that “we have a completely secure Columbus Lighthouse, all around it we have lighting and spotlights: I invite all the people to come at night to a monument that everyone should know.”6 Go Dominican Republic,theofficialDominicanRepublicTourism

5 “MOPC asfalta y sen˜aliza Calles del Faro a Colon,”´ Gobierno de la Republica´ Dominicana Orbas Publicas,´ https://www.mopc.gob.do/noticias/mopc-asfalta-y-se%C3%B1aliza-calles-del-faro- a-col%C3%B3n/. 6 “Tenemos un Faro a Colon´ completamente seguro, en todos los alrededores hay iluminacion´ y reflectores: invito a todo el pueblo a venir de noche a un monumento que deben de conocerlo todos.” Abraham Mendez,´ “Museo Faro a Colon´ listo para recibir visitants,” El Caribe, https://www.elcaribe. com.do/2018/11/09/museo-faro-colon-listo-para-recibir-visitantes/.

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One of the photos from the landing page for the Santo Domingo section of the official website of the Dominican Republic Tourism agency. (https://www.godominicanrepublic. com/santo-domingo/) website, offers a photograph of the Faro with bright pink flowers in the fore- ground, and tags of “home,” “family-friendly,” “iconic sites,” and “museums” to suggest a wholesome, safe, educational visit. Not everyone would use such tags. We have taken students to the site, and they perceive it very differently from the official tourism description. The students visit the site as part of a course we teach at the University of Toronto Mississauga on the history and ecology of the Columbian Exchange. In the field portion of the course, students join us on a nine-day trip to Santo Domingo and the SamanaPeninsulatoseehistorica´ lsitesfirsthandandexpe- rience how the effects of the Columbian Exchange have shaped today’s cul- tural and ecological realities in the Dominican Republic. While in Santo Domingo we visit several places of historic and cultural significance. In the early stages of planning the course we were ambivalent about taking the group to the Columbus Lighthouse, but we decided that it would be interesting for students to compare its presentation of Columbus’s legacy with what they had been studying in our seminar. We are glad that we made that decision, because the students’ reactions to the Faro’s enormity—reactions ranging from cynical laughter to on-the-spot sharp postcolonial critique—have convinced us that this monument can be a useful teaching tool when adequately contextualized. In contrast to what the Dominican Republic Tourism website would suggest, our students describe the Faro as “a monstrosity,” “ostentatiously in- appropriate,” “an architectural reminder of imperialism,” “colonial propaganda,” “a historically slanted viewpoint,” and “iconically ironic.” Just across the river is the colonial zone of Santo Domingo, a UNESCO world

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View of the Faro a Colon´ from the west with kite-flying in the foreground. (Photo by authors)

heritage site and genuinely beautiful; the Faro, by contrast, is both an aesthetic and a historic offence.7

Planning, Construction, Inauguration The Faro was more than a century in the making. The first plans to build a large memorial to Columbus in the Dominican Republic started in the mid-1800s, and these were given an injection of enthusiasm in 1877 with the exhumation of remains thought to be those of Columbus from the cathedral in Santo Domingo.8 An elaborate marble mausoleum was erected in the cathedral in time for the quater- centenary celebrations of Columbus in 1892, but the lighthouse would need to wait.

7 On the architecture of colonial Santo Domingo, see Paul B. Niell and Richard A. Sundt, “Architecture of Colonizers/Architecture of Immigrants: Gothic in Latin America from the 16th to the 20th Centuries,” Postmedieval 6, no. 3 (2015): 243–47; Paul B. Niell, “Late Gothic in the Sixteenth- Century Cathedral of Santa Maria´ la Menor, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic,” Postmedieval 6, no. 3 (2015): 258–71. On the investments made to encourage heritage and gentrification, see Laurence Buzenot and Jesus´ Manuel Gonzalez´ Perez,´ “La ville coloniale de Santo-Domingo (Republique´ dominicaine), entre patrimonialisation et gentrification,” E´ tudes caribeennes´ 39–40 (April-August, 2018). 8 Dixa Ramırez,´ Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 2018). For nineteenth-century arguments that the remains found in the cathedral were truly those of Christopher Columbus, see Jose´ Gabriel Garcıa,´ Compendio de la historia de Santo Domingo, Tomo 1 (Santo Domingo: Imprenta de Garcıa´ Hermanos, 1878), and Emiliano Tejera, Los Dos restos de Cristobal´ Colon´ exhumados de a Catedral de Santo Domingo en 1795 i 1877 (Santo Domingo: Imprenta de Garcıa´ Hermanos, 1879).

70 The Public Historian / Vol. 43 / May 2021 / No. 2 In the 1920s, the Pan American Union developed an interest in the project. This organization had its origins as theInternationalBureauofAmerican Republics at the first Pan American Conference in 1889.Withaninitialgoal of promoting economic ties across the hemisphere, it became a voluntary group of American Republics that was (according to its own publication) “devoted to the development and conservation of peace, friendship, and commerce between them all.”9 To many in Latin America, the cooperation suggested by the Pan American Union, headquartered in Washington, DC, was really a cover for efforts from the United States to dominate the Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/tph/article-pdf/43/2/63/461638/tph.2021.43.2.63.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 May 2021 hemisphere.10 The Resolution of the Fifth International Conference of American States opined in 1923 that “a monument has not yet been erected in America to perpetuate the collective sentiment of gratitude, admiration, and thanksgiving toward Christo- pher Columbus, discoverer of America and benefactor of humanity.”11 In response, the Conference launched a competition for the monument’s design in 1928. Its lengthily entitled Program and Rules of the Competition for the Selection of an Architect forThe Monumental Lighthouse which the Nations of theWorld will Erect in the Dominican Republic to the Memory of Christopher Columbus stated that the competition’s goal was “to find the perfect symbol which will worthily rep- resent the man and the deed to be commemorated.” The competitors were clearly instructed about the scope and significance of what they were attempting. To make their offering “more nearly perfect and more genuinely expressive of the significance of the discovery,” they were directed to “seek a universal viewpoint,” with a vision that “must include the five centuries of world history in which the discovery of America is the most transcendental fact.”12 The monument would be erected across the Ozama river from the colonial quarter of Santo Domingo, linking the old city to the new construction.13 More than 450 designs for a memo- rial lighthouse were submitted. The winning entry was by Joseph Lea Gleave, a relatively unknown British architect who was only twenty-three years old.14 Gleave described his design as both ancient and modern, both organic and

9 John Barrett, The Pan American Union: Peace Friendship Commerce (Washington: Pan American Union, 1911), 7. 10 Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 283–89; Jeffrey Sommers, “Haiti and the Hemispheric Imperative to Invest: The Bulletin of the Pan American Union,” Journal of Haitian Studies 9, no. 1 (2003): 71. 11 Bulletin of the Pan-American Union, 63 (1929), 680. 12 Albert Kelsey (F.A.I.A., Technical Advisor), Program and Rules of the Competition for the Selection of an Architect forThe Monumental Lighthouse which the Nations of the World will Erect in the Dominican Republic to the Memory of Christopher Columbus (Pan-American Union, 1928). 13 Francisco Egan˜a Casariego, “El Concurso Internacional para el Faro de Colon:´ El Proyecto espan˜ol premiado,” Goya: Revista de arte 331 (2010): 160. 14 “Joseph Lea Gleave,” DSA Architect Biography Report, http://www.scottisharchitects.org.uk/ architect_full.php?id 206874. ¼

The Faro a Colon´ in Santo Domingo 71 mechanical: “an Aztec serpent or a human body lying prostrate,” that was also “reminiscent of aeroplanes, ships, motor cars.”15 Construction was delayed for many years, hindered by the three-decade dicta- torship of Rafael Trujillo starting in the 1930s, power struggles in the 1960s, and US invasion and occupation in 1965.16 Work on the lighthouse finally began in 1986, with modifications to Gleave’s design by Dominican architect Teofilo´ Carbonell.17 By then, in an era of increasing urbanization and large-scale emigration, the gov- ernment of the Dominican Republic was seeing potential for the Faro to protect conservative ideas of national identity.18 The uncritical celebration of Columbus in Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/tph/article-pdf/43/2/63/461638/tph.2021.43.2.63.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 May 2021 this country was at odds with reactions in much of Latin America and parts of the Caribbean, where people reasserted Indigenous rights, debated the appropriateness of any commemoration to Columbus, and protested the quincentenary celebra- tions. In the Dominican Republic, the name of the official commission established for the 1992 anniversary left no doubt about its celebratory intent or its connections to discovery and conversion: “Comision´ Dominicana para la Celebracion´ del Quin- to Centenario del Descubrimiento y Evangelizacion de America.”´ 19 Dominican leaders wanted the monument to project an image of a grand country with a long European lineage, something that they hoped would increase international tourism and investment. Tourism was already an important part of the economy, bringing in almost twice as much income as the more traditional products of sugar, coffee, and cocoa combined. This economic shift did not enrich the country in any simple sense, however: building the infrastructure to support tourism’s growth—the roads and bridges, the museums and parks, the hotels and sports complexes—cost the government more money than tourism brought in, and this expenditure added to the growing foreign debt.20 Plans for the Faro were pulled into the tourism vortex, and they contributed another layer to the industry’s injustices. The chosen site for the Columbus Light- house was not emptily awaiting construction of the monument. It was a neighbor- hood, one of many whose inhabitants were evicted during the late 1980s and early 1990s to provide what President Joaquın´ Balaguer hoped would be “a dignified

15 Ramırez,´ Colonial Phantoms, 120; Robert Alexander Gonzalez,´ Designing Pan-America: U.S. Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 105. 16 Eric Paul Roorda, Lauren Derby, and Raymundo Gonzalez,´ eds., The Dominican Republic Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 6–7; B. W. Higman, A Concise History of the Caribbean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 204–6, 259–61. 17 Gonzalez,´ Designing Pan-America. 18 Dixa Ramırez,´ Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 112–14. 19 Fabienne Viala, The Post-Columbus Syndrome: Identities, Cultural Nationalism, and Commem- orations in the Caribbean (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1–9, 109–16, 131–36. On a more recent debate about the replacement of a statue to Columbus with one of Juana Azurduy, a nine- teenth-century mestiza revolutionary, see Cheryl Jimenez´ Frei, “Columbus, Juana and the Politics of the Plaza: Battles over Monuments, Memory and Identity in Buenos Aires,” Journal of Latin American Studies 51, no. 3 (2019): 607–38. 20 Greene, “Staged Cities,” 161–88.

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View from the Faro a Colon´ towards the city center. (Photo by authors) atmosphere for the observance of the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of the New World.”21 To make room for the Faro and surrounding park, over ten thousand people were forced out of their homes in Barrio Maquiteria. Then, a wall was erected to block visitors to the Faro’s site from having to see the people still living in poverty next to it. Locals dubbed it “the wall of shame.”22 On one side of the wall was a residential area with unpaved streets, uncollected garbage, and a public primary school with no electricity or running water.23 On the other side was a monument whose cost was kept secret but was estimated at between $70 million and $250 million in 1992. In a country with an annual per capita income of about $700, the Faro and its wall were a painful reminder of indifference to inequality.24

21 Joseph B. Treaster, “At 80, the Master Builder is Busy (and Boastful),” The New York Times, April 7, 1988. 22 Kenneth Freed, “Dominicans, Sadly, Find It’s a New World,” Los Angeles Times, October 12, 1992; Greene, “Staged Cities,” 161–88; Edmundo Morel and Manuel Mejia, “The Dominican Republic: Urban Renewal and Evictions in Santo Domingo,” in Evictions and the Right to Housing: Experience from Canada, Chile, the Dominican Republic, South Africa, and South Korea, ed. Antonio Azuela, Emilio Duhau, and Enrique Ortiz (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1998), 83–143. 23 Michael J. Rosenfeld, “Goodbye Columbus: Dominicans and the ‘Wall of Shame,’” Nation February 24, 1992. 24 Howard W. French, “Pope’s Mass at Dominican Monument to Columbus,” New York Times, October 12, 1992.

The Faro a Colon´ in Santo Domingo 73 Preparations went ahead for the inauguration ceremony. The big event was supposed to be hosted by President Balaguer, keen to impress foreign dignitaries with what he saw as the essence of the Dominican Republic. He and other Domin- ican elites were committed to instilling a deeper appreciation for the people’s Spanish (therefore European and white) heritage while rejecting or only grudgingly acknowledging African contributions to Dominican culture. The Dominican Republic shares an island with Haiti, but the two countries do not have an easy relationship. In the Dominican regime’s anti-Haitianism, Blackness was negatively associated with the country on the west side of the island. Balaguer’s esteem for Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/tph/article-pdf/43/2/63/461638/tph.2021.43.2.63.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 May 2021 Europe, by contrast, was evident when he wrote of Hispaniola’s “outstanding role as the catalyst that integrated the American Continent into European Civilization and the Christian Faith.”25 His celebration of the Columbus Lighthouse was part of a larger institutionalization of Hispanophilia and Negrophobia in Dominican iden- tity, seen also in a poster exhibition organized by the Dominican Commission for the Celebration of the Fifth Centennial of the Discovery and Evangelization of America. This exhibition presented twenty-nine “firsts” from the initial half-century of Spanish colonial rule in the Americas, celebrating the development of European settlements, conversions to Catholicism, extraction of national resources, and slave rebellions, while slyly avoiding any mention of Hispaniola being the first place in the Americas to bring enslaved Africans to its shores.26 The Columbus Lighthouse fit into the same tradition of extolling the Dominican people’s Spanishness, Catholicism, and whiteness. As a symbol of Dominicanidad, it celebrated the country’s inheritance selectively, steering citizens into a sense of patriotic belonging through an incomplete story of the country’s origins that focused on Christian Spain while ignoring African contributions and the violence of colonization.27 In the end, Balaguer could not be present at the inauguration event, because he was attending the funeral of his sister. He was not the only one missing. On the list of invited guests were the King and Queen of Spain and numerous heads of state. Most canceled. The planned television extravaganza to be hosted by Bob Hope was scrapped.28 Pope John Paul II was on the island for a General Conference of Latin

25 Quoted in Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Black Behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 90. 26 Medar´ Serrata, “Anti-Haitian Rhetoric and the Monumentalizing of Violence in Joaquın´ Balaguer’s Guıa´ emocional de la ciudad romantica´ ,” Hispanic Review 81, no. 3 (2013): 263–84; Cande- lario, Black Behind the Ears, 89–91. On Balaguer’s use of racialized political discourses, see David Howard, Coloring the Nation: Race and Ethnicity in the Dominican Republic (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001), 161–63. On Dominican ideas of Blackness, see Silvio Torres-Saillant, Introduction to Dominican Blackness (New York: CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, 2010) and April J. Mayes, The Mulatto Republic: Class, Race, and Dominican National Identity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014). 27 Christian Krohn-Hansen, “A Tomb for Columbus in Santo Domingo: Political Cosmology, Population and Racial Frontiers,” Social Anthropology 9,no.2 (2001): 165–92; Viala, The Post- Columbus Syndrome, 111. 28 Jimenez, “They Threw a Party to Celebrate Columbus, But Nobody Came,” 2; Greene, “Staged Cities,”161–88.

74 The Public Historian / Vol. 43 / May 2021 / No. 2 American Bishops, but he too stayed away from the Faro’s inauguration. (He did come to the Faro a few days later to celebrate an open-air Mass. In his homily, he spoke of the evangelization of Columbus’s voyage and the coming of light five hundred years ago in that place. But he also said that the five-hundredth anniver- sary of Columbus’s arrival was a propitious time humbly to ask forgiveness for offences and to create conditions that would allow for a fair development for all, especially the abandoned and dispossessed.29) The press was not complimentary in its coverage of the Columbus Lighthouse’s inauguration. Journalists from abroad wrote about the celebration as indicative of Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/tph/article-pdf/43/2/63/461638/tph.2021.43.2.63.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 May 2021 President Balaguer’s pretentions and prejudices. They saw it as an attempt to show his legitimacy when many Dominicans believed that he had rigged the most recent election, and to celebrate his country’s colonial past while hanging on to a repres- sive administration.30 They described the Faro itself as an “anonymous, inert grayness,”31 a “concrete monolith,”32 a “gloomy monument,”33 a “protuberance of concrete.”34 The inauguration of the Columbus Lighthouse, far from showing the world the greatness of Columbus’s connection to the Dominican Republic, turned out to be an international embarrassment.

Rediscovering the Discoverer Few historical figures’ reputations have varied so much as that of Christopher Columbus. In the Program and Rules setting up the competition in 1928 to design the lighthouse, Columbus is called “the great historical figure” whose achievement was “stupendous.” In an echo almost a century later, the US White House under President Trump issued a “Proclamation on , 2020,” stating that “we celebrate Columbus Day to commemorate the great Italian who opened a new chapter in world history and to appreciate his enduring significance to the Western Hemisphere.” It calls Columbus an “intrepid hero” and laments that “sadly, in recent years, radical activists have sought to undermine Christopher Columbus’s legacy.” According to the Trump administration’s proclamation, “these extremists seek to replace discussion of his vast contributions with talk of failings, his discov- eries with atrocities, and his achievements with transgressions.”35 But the growing list of places in the United States switching their October holiday from Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day shows that there is certainly no longer general agreement on the assessment of Columbus as simply a heroic discoverer, if ever

29 French, “Pope’s Mass at Dominican Monument to Columbus,” http://www.vatican.va/ content/john-paul-ii/es/homilies/1992/documents/hf_jpii_hom_19921011_v-centenario.html. 30 Viala, The Post-Columbus Syndrome, 131–33; Harding, “Rocky Course for Lighthouse in Eye of Storm.” 31 Ramırez,´ Colonial Phantoms, 120. 32 Harding, “Rocky Course for Lighthouse in Eye of Storm,” 12. 33 Kevin Rafferty, “A Gloomy Monument to Columbus,” Financial Times, August 29, 1992. 34 “Decouverte´ Saint-Domingue, Colomb chez Pharaon,” Le Monde, October 3, 1992. 35 “Proclamation on Columbus Day, 2020,” issued on October 9, 2020.

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Inscriptions on the Faro a Colon.´ (Photo by authors) there was.36 The schoolchildren we encounter on our travels to Santo Domingo are still eager to tell us that Columbus “discovered” their country, but historians can no longer ignore the disastrous consequences of Columbus’s voyages for the peoples of the Americas who were there when he arrived, and for the African and Indig- enous people who were enslaved to provide labor for the European colonists. The quincentenary of Columbus’ first voyage in 1992 sparked many historical reassessments of Columbus and his legacy, and some observers did raise objec- tions to the Faro a Colon.´ Demonstrators in the Dominican Republic said that it was an insult to the Indigenous people who were killed and to African people who were enslaved beginning with Columbus’s administration.37 They were right. This monument was designed to celebrate Columbus on a monumental scale while ignoring the enslavement and dispossession of colonization and its ongoing painful legacy of inequality. Alternatively, there is a way to see this monument as providing a true reflection of Columbus’s impact. A historically and historiographically informed interpreta- tion of the Columbus Lighthouse can show us the violence and greed that were central to the colonization of the Americas.

36 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “Good Day, Columbus,” in Silencing the Past: the Power and Pro- duction of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 108–40. 37 French, “Pope’s Mass at Dominican Monument to Columbus.”

76 The Public Historian / Vol. 43 / May 2021 / No. 2 First, consider its placement. The Faro is not actually located where Columbus first made landfall in the Americas (which was probably on one of the islands in the Bahamas), nor where he built his first settlement on the island of Hispaniola (which was on the north shore of what is now Haiti). The Faro is in the wrong location. But then, so was Columbus. Columbus sailed west from Europe not to find the Amer- icas, but to reach Asia. Based on fifteenth-century European understandings of geography that went back to Ptolemy and beyond, Columbus expected to get to Asia if he sailed westward across the Atlantic, and he did not anticipate a large landmass in the way.38 He knew that the Earth was spherical, but he underesti- Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/tph/article-pdf/43/2/63/461638/tph.2021.43.2.63.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 May 2021 mated its circumference.39 When he landed in what we now call the Caribbean, Columbus asked the inhabitants for information about China and Japan. Not finding either place, he tried to cast what he did see in the best possible light for the monarchs in whose names he was claiming possession. Columbus said in a letter that he wrote during his return crossing to Europe that the islands were fertile, the mountains lofty, the trees and fruits and plants “a wonder to behold on account of their beautiful variety.” In this paradise of a place lived people who were well built, intelligent, timorous and without iron weapons, guileless and generous with all they had. Columbus even reassured his readers not once, but twice, that he had found no monsters.40 With this letter, Columbus was making the case that his sponsors should continue to invest in what would surely be an easy claim of overlordship for Spain. Not that Columbus understood where he was; he continued to think he had landed in Asia. By his third voyage across the Atlantic, Columbus began to consider the possibility that he was on a different continental mass, but on his fourth trip he thought that perhaps he was seeing Malaysia.41 Columbus’s basic geographical confusion is well represented by the misplacement of his lighthouse. His remains might have been misplaced too. It’s possible that the body of Columbus lies in the Faro. Someone’s probably does—the remains that were exhumed from Santo Domingo’s cathedral in 1877. But it is unclear exactly whose bones these are, and the Dominican authorities have so far refused to open the tomb to try and find out. The movements of the bones are both confusing and contested. Columbus died in Valladolid, Spain, in 1506, and his body was buried in Seville. Some years later, his daughter-in-law had the remains moved to the cathe- dral in Santo Domingo, as Columbus had wished. Spain ceded the colony to France

38 The Behaim Globe, or “Erdapfel,” is an excellent illustration of what Europeans thought about the commercial possibilities of global sea travel in 1492. See Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1996), 295–301. 39 William D. Phillips Jr., “Columbus, Christopher,” in The Oxford Companion to World Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 40 “Columbus’ letter to Santangel,”´ in New Iberian World: A Documentary History of the Dis- covery and Settlement of Latin America to the Early 17th century, Volume II, ed. John H. Parry and Robert G. Keith (New York: Times Books, 1984), 58–62. 41 Stewart A. Weaver, Exploration: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 55.

The Faro a Colon´ in Santo Domingo 77 in 1795, and Spanish officials took the bones to Havana. In 1898, after won its independence from Spain, the remains in Havana were transferred back to Seville. This is the provenance claimed by the cathedral in Seville for the bones it assumes are the remains of Columbus. The people who found the lead casket in the Cathedral of Santo Domingo in 1877 thought differently. They interpreted an abbreviated inscrip- tion on the casket’s lid to mean that it contained the remains of Christopher Colum- bus, and they figured that the bones that had earlier been removed to Havana were actually those of Diego, Christopher’s son. Those who argue that Columbus’s re- mains are in Seville point to results of a DNA analysis showing that the bones there Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/tph/article-pdf/43/2/63/461638/tph.2021.43.2.63.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 May 2021 are those of someone from the Columbus family.42 It is still possible that both sides are right, that some of Columbus’s bones lie in Seville and some in Santo Domingo, but the confusion about where exactly the explorer’s bones lie in death is a suitable echo for that explorer’s confusion about where exactly he had travelled in life. Next, consider the displacement caused by the construction of the Faro. It was built where people had their homes, a reminder that Columbus took credit for discovering a place where many people already lived, and then proceeded to displace and kill those in the way of colonization. The actions of Columbus and the conquistadors who followed him led to the deaths of millions and the dispos- session of millions more. Much of the violence was deliberate. According to Co- lumbus’s childhood friend Michele de Cuneo, Columbus had “given” him a captured Indigenous woman. De Cuneo wrote in a letter that when she resisted his attempts to “take [his] pleasure with her” and “satisfy [his] desire,” he whipped her until she screamed, and bragged that “eventually we came to such terms, I assure you, that you would have thought she had been brought up in a school for whores.”43 The island on which the Faro is built endured some of the bloodiest violence of Columbus’s endeavor. In 1542, the conquistador-turned-Dominican- friar Bartolome´ de Las Casas described Hispaniola as “the first to suffer the whole- sale slaughter of its people and the devastation and depopulation of the land.”44 Outcries against the colonists’ violence are not just a product of our own age; there were Spanish settlers in the early years of New Spain who protested too. The Spanish Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos delivered a sermon on Hispaniola in 1511 as “the voice of Christ crying in the wilderness” castigating his listeners: “This voice says that you are in mortal sin, that you live and die in it, for the cruelty and tyranny you use in dealing with these innocent people.”45 None of this cruelty

42 Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 69–75; Bess Lovejoy, “The Scattered Bones of Columbus,” Lapham’s Quarterly, October 15, 2013. 43 Michele de Cuneo, quoted in Stephanie Wood, “Sexual Violation in the Conquest of the Americas,” in Sex and Sexuality in Early America, ed. Merril D. Smith (New York: New York Uni- versity Press, 1998), 11. 44 Bartolome´ de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, ed. and trans. Nigel Griffin (London: Penguin, 1992), 14. 45 Daniel Castro, Another Face of Empire: Bartolome´ de las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Eccle- siastical Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 56.

78 The Public Historian / Vol. 43 / May 2021 / No. 2 and tyranny is overtly commemorated in the Faro monument, neither the dispos- session of Indigenous peoples nor the forced transport of Africans across the ocean. But with the razing of a neighborhood on the monument’s site, the injustice of displacement is now part of the Faro’s own history. The sheer size of the Faro is yet another sense in which the monument repre- sents Columbus. Whether you like it or not, the Columbus Lighthouse is too big to disregard. This exaggerated bulk is a good representation of Columbus in two ways. First, he was a grasping social climber, always ready to exaggerate his importance. In making a voyage westward across the ocean, what he called his “enterprise of the Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/tph/article-pdf/43/2/63/461638/tph.2021.43.2.63.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 May 2021 Indies,” Columbus hoped that establishing a sea-route to Asia would secure for him personal advancement so that he could rise above his rather humble beginnings as the son of a weaver and tavern keeper. His plan seemed to be working when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella promised to name him Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Viceroy and Governor of any lands he might discover.46 His leadership skills, however, were questionable at best. On his first voyage, the captain of one of the three ships sailed offwithout Columbus’s permission to explore by himself. A second ship ran aground and was wrecked. Not having room for all his men aboard his only remaining vessel, Columbus left thirty-nine of them behind on Hispaniola at a hastily constructed fort. When he returned the following year, he found them all dead.47 His next attempted settlement was another disaster that was abandoned within five years.48 Once Columbus managed to get something more lasting estab- lished, he proved to be a terrible governor, as the people of his own time knew very well. He and his two brothers were arrested in 1500 for failure to maintain order in the colony, and they were sent back to Spain in chains.49 Disastrous though Columbus was as an administrator, the historical significance of his landfall in the Americas is the second way in which the size of the Faro works as a symbol. Columbus did not find a “New World,” but he helped to create one. Starting in 1492, sustained links between the two hemispheres brought about the first truly global age, forever changing human cultures, economic organizations, and natural ecosystems.50 The consequences of Columbus’s voyage may sometimes be ugly, but they are undeniably significant.

46 Weaver, Exploration: A Very Short Introduction, 50–51. 47 Phillips, “Columbus, Christopher.” 48 Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); Kathleen Deagan, “Colonial Transformation: Euro-American Cultural Genesis in the Early Spanish American Colonies,” Journal of Anthropological Research 52, no. 2 (1996): 135–60; Higman, A Concise History of The Caribbean. 49 Weaver, Exploration: A Very Short Introduction, 43; Massimo Livi Bacci, “Return To Hispa- niola: Reassessing a Demographic Catastrophe,” Hispanic American Historical Review 83, no. 1 (2003): 3–51. 50 Mann, 1493; Higman, A Concise History of The Caribbean; Reinaldo Funes Monzote, “The Columbian Moment: Politics, Ideology, and Biohistory,” in The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. Stephan Palmie´ and Francisco A. Scarano (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 83–95; Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, 30th Anniversary Edition (Westport: Greenwood Publishing, 2003).

The Faro a Colon´ in Santo Domingo 79 Finally, consider the Faro’s light. The intended symbolism of beams shooting an enormous cross into the sky is pretty obvious, but it is difficult to understand how the violence wrought upon Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Africans in the wake of Columbus’s voyage can honestly be seen as enlightening in any way. Yet the lighthouse reflects Columbus even here. The Faro has pretentions to cast light, but rarely does so, because turning on the Faro’s skyward illumination seems to put too much strain on the electrical system and leads to blackouts in the adjacent areas. The lighthouse cannot be turned on, because it drains the light from its surround- ings. The light of Columbus plunges the people into darkness. Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/tph/article-pdf/43/2/63/461638/tph.2021.43.2.63.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 May 2021 With a consideration of the monument’s history in mind, and set against the historical record of early modern colonization, the Faro a Colon´ really could become a “more nearly perfect” symbol for the significance of Christopher Colum- bus in the history of the Americas. Accidentally and in spite of itself, the Columbus Lighthouse communicates a lesson that teaches the consequences of Columbus’s voyage much more truly than the monument’s original planners ever intended: the colonization of the Americas is a history of misplacement, displacement, grasping greed, and the extinguishing of many lights.



Mairi Cowan is an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. She is a historian of the late medieval and early modern world, with specializations in the social and religious histories of Europe and North America. Christoph Richter is an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Department of Biology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He studies the impacts of human activities on mammals in marine and urban environments. The authors have taken groups of students to the Faro a Colon´ as part of a study abroad trip in their course on the history and ecology of the Columbian Exchange. They would like to thank the editors of The Public Historian and the anonymous reviewers who provided helpful suggestions for our paper; the UTM Abroad Team for their support of student travel; the students who study with us; and the people of the Dominican Republic.

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