Cover Story

Confidence is contagious:

Next stop Atlantis, Cuba

Long-ago Greek philosopher Plato may have unwittingly unleashed a modern day political Battle Royale on an unsuspecting world with his haunting tales of the lost city, Atlantis.

Untold legions took to heart the philosopher’s lament that `earthquakes and floods ‘in `one terrible day and night’ destroyed his Atlantic island empire.

Drama in writing style was not lost on this student of Socrates, who recorded his thoughts post-8570 BC in the TIMAEUS and circa 9421 BC in the CRITIAS.

Now a `lost city’, that could be the fabled city of Atlantis, has been discovered by a Canadian scientific research team, off the western coast of Cuba.

Why is it that latter day, long-lost sunken treasures always seem to come with a Canadian connection?

At about the same time as Soviet-born ocean engineer Paulina Zelitsky, the president of the Canadian-based company Advanced Digital Communications (ADC), had detected what could be Atlantis in deep waters off Cuba, an unnamed "respected Canadian architect" discovered a sunken boat with which he claimed the Chinese really discovered Canada and the western hemisphere. The boat-finding architect is headed for the United Nations to have the site officially declared as a World Heritage site.

Davey Jones’ Locker is giving up many recent discoveries around the world.

On May 28 2002, National Geographic News reported on the recent discovery of megalithic ruins some 2,200 ft. below sea level off the coast of Cuba. Interviewed for the story was geologist, Manuel Iturralde, Director of Research at Cuba’s Natural History Museum and consulting geologist for Canadian exploration company ADC, based in Havana, Cuba.

According to a 2001 Special Report by Gateway to Atlantis author Andrew Collins, "The discoveries were made last summer during deep-sea surveys made by Paulina and a trained scientific research team aboard the Cuban research vessel, Ulysses.

"Sonar images revealed `an extensive series of structures’ over a several-mile area in darker and lighter shades. The site is close to the edge of the underwater geological feature known as the Cuban shelf, which falls off sharply in a series of shelves which drop down to several thousand metres, and it is on one of these shelves, in around 600-700 metres of water, that the structures are to be found."

"`Whenever you find a volcano, there is often a settlement associated with it,’ Paul Weinzweig, Paulina’s husband and a director of ADC, observed. `I don’t know the exact relationship, but it is in the same vicinity as the volcano, the fault line and the river. They’re quite close to one another.’

"On the matter of whether the sonar imagery really does show `pyramids, roads and buildings`, Paul stated: `We had been looking at the images for some months, and keep a picture on the wall showing pyramids in the Yucatan, and let’s just say they kept reminding us of these structures. They really do look like an urban development.’"

Finding sunken cities, much less the fabled Atlantis, was not the main mission of ADC in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Their original scientific operation was to survey the deep waters off the Cuban coastline as part of a joint venture set up between the Canadian company and the Cuban government, in particular its state partner Geomar.

One of their chief aims is to pinpoint the location of the billions of dollars of bullion and lost treasure from sunken ships dating back to the Conquest.

"Cuba has the richest galleon cemetery in the world," says Weinzweig.

Cuba treasure seekers include Visa Gold, a Toronto-based, low-tech company operating out of Havana’s Marina Hemingway, which claims to have retrieved some 7,000 items from sunken vessels. In the cache from a brigantine called Palemon, lost off Cuba’s northern coast in 1839, the booty included jewellery, diamonds and pistols.

ADC’s husband and wife team are not the first to have laid claim to the discovery of sunken cities off the coast of Cuba.

There are unconfirmed reports that Soviet submarines discovered an underwater "building complex" during the 1960s.

Leicester Hemingway, brother of writer Ernest Hemingway claimed to have spotted, during a flight into the country, 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 this underwater marble city remains unclear. The Soviet submarine underwater "building complex" remains unconfirmed and there are no actual pictures of undersea objects in the ADC find.

But the ADC claim, if ever proven, like the Canadian architect’s claim of having found the Chinese boat that proves that the Chinese reached North America first, would change the course of world history.

"If Paulina Zelitsky and her oceanographic colleagues are right in their belief that `pyramids, roads and buildings’, do lie off Cuba’s western coastline, then it is clear that the prehistory of the Caribbean, and its influence on the rise of Mesoamerican civilization, will have to be revised dramatically," says Collins. "Moreover, it could well be that at long last the mystery of Atlantis, mankind’s greatest historical enigma, is about to unfold in a most spectacular fashion."

Perhaps it would do us well to remember that while Cuba may be eons away from the democratic world in the political realm, in geographic terms, it’s only 90 miles off the coast of Florida.