Cuba and the Yucatan peninsula were once connected by a land bridge. Scientists are excited but reluctant to speculate about the possibility a sunken city possibly built in the pre-classic period and populated by an advanced civilization similar to the early Teotihuacan culture of Yucatan that was recently announced at a depth of about 2,200 feet off Cuba. Researchers using sonar equipment have discovered a huge land plateau with clear images of what appears to be urban development partly covered by sand. From above, the shapes resemble pyramids, roads and buildings.

A huge pyramid, in 10,000 feet of Atlantic water, was reported to have been found with a pulsating crystal on top of it, by Tony Benik’s expedition. The group also found an opaque crystal tablet there, and reported that when a light was beamed through it, mysterious inscriptions became visible. More underwater pyramids were found off Central America, Yucatan, and Louisiana, where domes were found in the Straits of Florida. A marble Greek style building was reportedly found between Florida and Cuba.

Episode Treatment:

In 2002 I visited a Canadian company in Cuba operating from Havana called Advanced Digital Communications (ADC) who were/are searching for sunken galleons. A year earlier, however, they announced they had located a city underwater, Atlantis they speculated, on the sea bottom.  To this day, the debate rages.  After all, the ruins were located at a depth of nearly 2000 feet, and the oceans only rose a maximum of 600 feet 12,000 years ago – so if it is a city, then it is a very old city indeed.

• Traditional history: The Taino, Columbus and genocide
• Legendary history: Isle of Youth, petroglyphs and buried treasure
• Mythological history: Deminán Caracaracol, a female turtle and the twins
• Alternative history: Bahamas, Charles Berlitz and Crystals

In September 1972 American oceanic explorer J. Manson Valentine, flying over the Bahamas in a light aircraft with and his associate Jim Richardson, noticed a mass of rectilinear and curvilinear features in shallow waters on the south-western edge of the former Bahaman landmass (now the Great Bahama Bank).  They faced out across the Old Bahama Channel, like some kind of ancient port serving the Cuban mainland, they reported.

As early as the 1950s light-aircraft pilots reported seeing what they described as underwater ‘stonework’ which was ‘well within Cuban waters’. Similar sightings ‘north of Cuba’ of an alleged ‘submerged building complex covering over ten acres’ might even convince the Cuban government that a veritable city awaited discovery in its vigorously defended waters.  Among those who also felt they had glimpsed the remains of a lost citadel in Cuban waters was Leicester Hemingway, brother of the writer Ernest Hemingway.  During a flight into the country, Leicester noticed, beyond its northern coast, ‘an expanse of stone ruins, several acres in area and apparently white, as if they were marble’. The exact location of these underwater features remains unclear.

In Andrew Collins’ book Gateway To Atlantis, he proposed in 2000 that the mechanism behind Atlantis’ destruction was a comet impact which devastated the eastern Atlantic coast of America, causing literally 500,000 elliptical craters, known today as the Carolina Bays, sometime around 8500 BC (+/- 500 years).  Fragments of the comet falling in the Western Atlantic basin, north of the Bahamas, would have created tsunami tidal-waves perhaps hundreds of metres high.  Myths and legends told by the indigenous peoples of the Bahaman and Caribbean archipelagos, when the Spanish first reached the New World, spoke of just such a cataclysm.

The old Taino language name for Turtle Island was once called Amikekia (The People’s Island Land of the Great Lord). Today they call it America.  He who made the sun and the moon warned the Tainos to watch out for the dead.  (In the daytime the dead hid themselves and ate guavas, but at night they went out for a stroll and challenged the living. Dead men offered duels and dead women, love. In the duels they vanished at will; and at the climax of love the lover found himself with nothing in his arms.) Before accepting a duel with a man or lying down with a woman, one should feel the belly with one’s hand, because the dead have no navels.

The lord of the sky warned the Tainos to watch out even more for people with clothes on.  Chief Caicihu fasted for a week and was worthy of his words. “Brief shall be the enjoyment of life,” announced the invisible one, he who has a mother but no beginning. “Men wearing clothes shall come, dominate, and kill.”  A recent book called “Atlanticu” (The Origin of El Tajin) is based upon Mesoamerican Amerindian legends and the origins of the advanced forms of Central American ancient civilizations that came from, according to oral history, a race of tall white people from an island to the east which sank in a cataclysmic earthquake.