Points in favour of Cuba being Atlantis

 

  1. Plato says that Atlantis was an island landmass which lay in the Atlantic Ocean beyond which was a series of `other lands' that enabled `voyagers' from his own world to reach the `opposite continent'. This statement perfectly describes the geographical relationship between Cuba and both the Bahamas and the Mid-Caribbean island group which have been used since ancient times as stepping stones to reach the American mainland.

  2. Plato tells us that Atlantis possessed a large fertile plain protected from cold northerly winds by mountain ranges. This precisely describes Cuba's great western plain, between Havana and Pinar del Río, shielded between November and February each year from `les nortes', the cold northerly winds which come in from the eastern United States, by the Cord de Guaniguanico mountain range.

  3. Plato tells us that Atlantis was drowned during earthquakes and floods which occurred during one terrible night and a day. Cuba's great plain was partially drowned following the rise in sea level brought about by the melting of the ice at end of the glacial age, c. 8000 BC. Some 500 years earlier, Cuba - along the rest of the Antilles - would have been devastated by earthquakes and tsunamis following the fragmentation and multiple impacts of a comet which devastated the Western Hemisphere in c. 8600-8500 BC. The drowned portion of the plain now lies beneath the Bay of Batabanó and once stretched as far as the Isla de Juventus (Isle of Youth).

  4. Over 60 sites of possible archaeological interest have been noted on the former Bahaman landmass, now known to marine geologists as the Great Bahama Bank. By far the greatest accumulation of sites cluster on its south-west edge close to Cay Guinchos, Diamond Point and Cay Lobos facing out towards the northern coast of Cuba. If these curious features do turn to be of artificial construction then it means that the proposed former Bahaman culture was integrally linked with the Cuban mainland. Before the waters rose up after the end of the last Ice Age only the Old Bahama Channel would have separated Cuba from the Bahaman landmass.

  5. The memory of an Atlantic island called Atlantis which lay in the Far West would appear to derive from Iberic Phoenician, and later Carthaginian, sea-journeys to the western Atlantic seaboard from around 1200 BC onwards. After the fall of Carthage in 147 BC the former Carthaginian territories were occupied by seafaring Berber tribes who as the Moors invaded Spain in the eighth century AD. They reintroduced the concept of a western isle lying far out in the ocean and called it Antilia, a name derived from the same Semitic word root as Atlantis showing their common origin. Geographers have identified Antillia as Cuba, while the appearance of Antilia on medieval maps matches very well a truncated form of Cuba shown on the Turkish Piri Reis map of 1513. Professor Charles Hapgood of Keene University determined that this nautical chart was derived originally from a patchwork of pre-Columbian source maps, suggesting a maritime knowledge of Cuba before the time of the Conquest.

  6. The founding families of various Central American cultures, as well as great civilisers such as Quetzalcoatl and Votan, were said to have come from an island set in the waters located in an easterly direction. Unquestionably it was one of the Caribbean islands, and various traditions record that the island in question was Cuba. The blood-red earth which dominates its western plain accounts for the name given to Quetzalcoatl's original homeland which was Huehue Tlapallan, the `old, old red land'. The other names given to this homeland were Tulan, a word which can be shown to have the same root as Atlantis.

  7. Located on the Mesoamerican island homeland was a place of emergence of the human race known as the Seven Caves. The only location in the Caribbean which appears to fit its description is Ceuva # 1 of the `seven caves' complex at Punta del Este on Cuba's Isle of Youth. Its walls are adorned which dozens of petroglyphs of a celestial nature drawn many thousands of years ago.

  8. Occasionally the seven tribes whose ancestors had emerged from the Seven Caves were seen as having constructed Seven Cities, arguably the root behind the Portuguese medieval belief in the existence of Seven Cities on the island of Antilia, the medieval form of Atlantis.

  9. In the eighteenth century Friar Ramon de Ordoñez y Aguilar, canon of the cathedral town of Ciudad-Réal in Chiapas, told the odyssey of a Central American culture hero named Votan who came out of the east from a land called Valum Chivim and settled on an island named Valum Votan, identified as Cuba, before journeying on to the Yucatán. Andrew Collins demonstrates how Votan is the memory of a Bronze Age Iberic Phoenician seafarer who made transatlantic voyages as early as 2000 BC. A knowledge of Valum Votan's, or Cuba's, topography and catastrophe legends thus entered the classical world prior to the age of Plato. It was from such knowledge, particularly a description of Cuba's western plain, its fertility, its occupation by Iberic Phoenicians and Carthaginians, and the memory of a former great cataclysm which divided the Caribbean into individual islands, that Plato constructed his Atlantis account. A near contemporary writer known as pseudo-Aristotle also wrote about a similar island paradise in his work entitled On Marvellous Things Heard. C. 300 BC.

  10. Cuba can also be identified as one of the Islands of the Hesperides, which the Roman geographer Statius Sebosus (as recorded by Pliny the Elder and Solinus) stated lay 40 days' sail beyond the Gorgades, an ancient name for the Cape Verde islands. It took Christopher Columbus 33 days to sail between the Cape Verdes and Barbados in the Caribbean on his third voyage to the New World in 1498. Like Atlantis, the concept of the Hesperides, the islands of the Far West, is considered to be of Phoenician origin.

  11. Top Italian scientist Emilio Spedicato, Professor of Operations Research, at Bergamo University has recently proposed that the island of Hispaniola, Cuba's easterly neighbor, was Plato's Atlantis. Yet having reviewed Andrew Collins' evidence in favour of Cuba being Atlantis he now sees it `as a very good candidate …only archaeological work will perhaps solve the riddle.'