Tsereteli designed the statue in 1991 to mark the 500th anniversary of Columbus's first voyage. The figure depicts Columbus gripping an anachronistic steering wheel, backed by the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria crossing a stylized Atlantic. At over 1.3 million pounds, the scale was staggering - and that was the problem. New York City was offered it first, with a proposal to erect it on Roosevelt Island. Officials worried it would visually overwhelm the Statue of Liberty while being dwarfed by Manhattan's skyscrapers. Miami Beach considered South Pointe, near the Port of Miami entrance, but the idea stalled. A smaller companion piece, The Birth of a New Man, found a home in Seville, Spain in 1995. The original remained in pieces.

The statue arrived in Puerto Rico in 1998, bound for Catano near San Juan Bay. Controversy erupted immediately. Homes would need demolition to make room. The assembly cost was deemed excessive. The Office of the Comptroller discovered $1.6 million in unpaid import taxes, and investigators probed whether public funds had covered a mayor's trip to Russia to meet Tsereteli. Concerns were raised that the monument might interfere with air traffic at Luis Munoz Marin International Airport. By 2008, Catano had given up, transferring the pieces to a private port developer in Mayaguez. That plan collapsed too. Arecibo finally took ownership, but Taino activists and environmental groups protested, opposing both the celebration of Columbus and the project's impact on the coastal zone.

The controversy over Birth of the New World runs deeper than aesthetics or cost. Columbus's voyages opened the door to European colonization of the Americas - a process that devastated indigenous populations across the hemisphere. The Taino people, who inhabited Puerto Rico when Ponce de Leon arrived in 1508, were virtually destroyed within decades through forced labor, disease, and violence. In 2014, the Movimiento Indigena Jibaro Boricua joined other groups protesting the monument's assembly. Their objection was fundamental: celebrating Columbus means celebrating the beginning of indigenous genocide. The statue stands at the intersection of competing historical narratives, embodying a question that has no easy answer - how should the hemisphere reckon with the human cost of its founding story?

Whatever the moral debate, the statue has reshaped Arecibo's economy. After the 2020 collapse of the Arecibo Observatory - for decades the municipality's primary tourist draw - Birth of the New World became the region's anchor attraction. Drivers pull off Puerto Rico Highway 22 in such numbers that legislators introduced a bill to build a dedicated lookout and rest area. Restaurants and bars have flourished from the increased traffic. In 2021, the town hall secretary acknowledged the controversy around Columbus but noted the tourism revenue filling municipal coffers. The assembly investment was estimated at $98 million, and the statue survived Hurricane Maria in 2017 without structural damage, though surrounding infrastructure was heavily affected. For a town that lost its other landmark, the statue that nobody wanted has become indispensable.