Columbus The Memorious: Commemorations of the 500th Anniversary of the Discovery of the New World in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic

Abstract

This chapter examines the representations of Columbus’s journeys and colonization of the Caribbean region in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, during the commemorations of the 500th anniversary of his arrival in1992. Its title, which alludes to Borges’s well-known text Funes The Memorious, references the hyper-commemorative nature of the Hispanic Caribbean societies, which intensified during the quincentenary commemoration. The event became a magnifying glass for the three countries to affirm their national identities and their existence as Caribbean political exceptions. Collective memory became the favorite platform for the states to react to the new forms of colonial hegemonies emerging after the end of the Cold War. While the commemorations assumed a different character according to the sociopolitical agendas of each island at the time, they shared a grand scale, particularly in light of the upcoming 1898 celebrations: if 1992 was the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the region, 1998 marked the first centenary of the United States’ wresting control of the Caribbean basin from Spain after the Spanish-American War in 1898. The coincidence of events transformed the scenarios for celebrating national memory and remembering the role of Columbus in public spaces and in the national literatures, in the specific context of crisis that each island was going through at the time.