When conditions finally allowed for its installation, they placed it somewhere other than the site Escandón had suggested, in front of the Buena Vista station. His idea had been that travelers would see it as they stepped off the train. Porfirio Díaz's Secretary of Development, Vicente Riva Palacio, decided otherwise. He installed it in 1877 at the first roundabout of the Paseo, overriding both the wishes of the man who had made it possible and a considerable share of public opinion.

At that moment Columbus was seen almost universally as a symbol of European civilization, of the dawn of the modern world, of scientific progress and the unstoppable expansion of knowledge. In nineteenth-century Spanish America, the new republics sought to insert themselves within these traditions.

The monumental ensemble also presents evangelization as an essential part of the birth of New Spain. A reading with an intense nineteenth-century aroma, as could hardly be otherwise. Discovery, evangelization, and civilization on the same plate. As a project, it inaugurates what today might be considered an open-air museum of what the Mexican State has been from its origins.

And yes, the disputes began from day one.

Some Mexican artists found the composition ugly, the proportions disproportionate, the fact that Columbus was not, in truth, as handsome as the high-resolution photographs of 1492 had shown, and, most important, nearly all of the guild's vexation came from the project being awarded to a vulgar Frenchman, when Mexico had sculptors falling out of its pockets.

With this and other clamors in the background, there followed, in succession, the statue of Cuauhtémoc, the monuments to the heroes of the Reform, the statues of the liberals, and finally, the Column of Independence in 1910. As already noted, the avenue was becoming a walk through Mexico's official history, where each monument represented a chapter of the national narrative.

In 2020, the planet was profoundly indignant and everything bothered everyone. After the brutal murder of George Floyd, hundreds of anti-racist protests erupted, and numerous statues of colonizers, slavers, and conquistadors were razed.

In autumn, while nearly everyone slept, recovering from a long day of sustained indignation, in an operation coordinated by the authorities and the INAH, Columbus was lowered from his column in the cold dawn of October 10th. By the time the indignant stepped out for their revolutionary café con leche, Columbus had already escaped their righteous outrage.

The operation was presented as part of a restoration process. But the government decided Columbus would not return to his roundabout. It took up the political revision the collectives were demanding in the name of memory. Along with Columbus vanished Diego de Deza, Juan Pérez de Marchena, Pedro de Gante, and the ineffable Fray Bartolomé de las Casas. The last two only partly escape the condemnation of the irascible contemporary spirit thanks to their defense of the indigenous and their educational work. But they remain tied to the colonial evangelizing project. Into storage, without further ceremony.

Perfectly restored, with an impeccable haircut, the Admiral has remained since 2022 at the National Institute of Anthropology and History. And there he stays because, in spite of everything, he is catalogued as a historical monument. Any intervention —dismantling, relocation, vandalization, burning, melting down, stoning, or reinstallation— requires, by law, technical criteria and specialized oversight.

Spain has just won the football World Cup. Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo had Felipe VI, the king, right at her elbow, and — on Peacock TV at least — she looked cheerful, with little intention of demanding apologies for the mischief Hernán Cortés committed in the sixteenth century. I think today of Cristóbal Colón and his conjuring away from public view, not because I find him a very charming and dashing gentleman, but because he strikes me as an unsurpassable catalyst of the rancorous spirit of our days. At times his chronic ambient indignation exasperates me. A short jaunt through social media is enough to notice that atmosphere smelling of the end of the world, of the collapse of Western civilization.

From where Columbus kept his balance —branded by the contemporary hordes as an antimonument— for more than a century, we are now watched by the Young Woman of Amajac, a replica of an original found by accident practically yesterday, in January 2022, in a citrus grove in Hidalgo Amajac, Veracruz. This is, to this day, an archaeological object, eroded and without inscription. Nobody knows who she is! Whether she really was a young woman, whether she represents a fertility deity, a Huastec noblewoman, or a ruler. Hoisting her up there in haste only makes sense as a deeply populist and anesthetizing political act.

It is desolating to sustain so traumatic a relationship with one's own history. I don't recall in the Cuba I left behind heated debates or intellectual lynchings over figures as reprobate as Pánfilo de Narváez, the Count of Valmaseda, or Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau. Even Francisco de Arango y Parreño, Miguel de Aldama y Alfonso, and Julián de Zulueta, all tied to the slave trade, still keep streets in their names. The revolutionary government chose the United States as its principal enemy; Mexico, it seems, opted for a less contentious one, the late Hernán Cortés. What the Cuban government did do was dismantle every statue on what had once been the Avenue of the Presidents. It replaced them with ridiculous, rustic monuments, all stone and hardly any metal, which look more like little tin soldiers than statesmen.

Are the original statues somewhere, restored, waiting for better times? Like hell they are! The Cuban Revolution has been to Cuba what Vesuvius was to Pompeii. Not only for its material heritage. In 2026 there are "patriots", of the couch and the little bag of chips, taking issue with the hemoglobin of Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara.