Cozumel Restaurant List

[ggunn]

Am I wrong in the belief that Mateo is not actually an owner or partner in the restaurant, but only married to one? Just curious.

I have no insight into what their financial arrangement is.

 

[El Graduado]

I have no insight into what their financial arrangement is.

OK. Since you called him your old friend and the owner of 'Ohana's, I thought maybe you did know their arrangement. Their website says:

He told me once that the restaurant Rastas was founded in the 1970s when there were only 6,000 people living in Cozumel, so, I guess he can exaggerate things at times. When I told him Rasta's didn't open until the late 1980s and there were over 30,000 people living here then, he didn't believe it.

 

[ggunn]

My first excursion around the island was in 1978, but I do not remember if Bob's Marley Bar was there or not at the time. I do remember The Naked Turtle (more recently Playa Bonita, now defunct and slowly collapsing into the sea) and El Mirador from that trip. I'm pretty sure that Angela's family owns the land where Rasta's is, but I can't comment on the veracity of what Mateo says about it.

 

[El Graduado]

My first excursion around the island was in 1978, but I do not remember if Bob's Marley Bar was there or not at the time. I do remember The Naked Turtle (more recently Playa Bonita, now defunct and slowly collapsing into the sea) and El Mirador from that trip. I'm pretty sure that Angela's family owns the land where Rasta's is, but I can't comment on the veracity of what Mateo says about it.

Rasta's opened in 1987. The name of the beach it is on is Playa Bush, named after Pablo Bush Romero. It was often misspelled as Playa Box, Playa Bosch, and Playa Bosh.

 

[ggunn]

Rasta's opened in 1987. The name of the beach it is on is Playa Bush, named after Pablo Bush Romero. It was often misspelled as Playa Box, Playa Bosch, and Playa Bosh.

Are you talking about the place on the water or the one across the road from it? The place on the water used to have a sign out front proclaiming it to be Bob's Marley Bar and another over the door calling it The Paradise Cafe. Might Playa Box be correct with the sh Mayan pronunciation of x? Holbox sounds like "ho-bosh", doesn't it?

 

[El Graduado]

Are you talking about the place on the water or the one across the road from it? The place on the water used to have a sign out front proclaiming it to be Bob's Marley Bar and another over the door calling it The Paradise Cafe. Might Playa Box be correct with the sh Mayan pronunciation of x? Holbox sounds like "ho-bosh", doesn't it?

I am talking about the first operation that the family had at Playa Bush.

Playa Bush is named after Pablo Bush Romero aka Pablo Bush. He pulled some cannons out of the water from there in the late 1950s. He also founded Akumal and CEDAM. He is also responsible for the god-awful statues of Gonzalo Guerrero and his wife and kids, and the erroneous monument to Jean Lafitte in Dzilam.

Box in Yucatec Mayan means "black." Hol in Yucatec Mayan means "hole." In Spanish, Holbox is Hoyo negro and it means "Black hole" in English. Playa Box in English would be "Black Beach." Why Holbox got such an unappealing name, I do not know. Maybe I'll look into it one day.

Below is an image of Bush with two cannons he raised near Isla Mujeres, on the Chitales reef.

 

[ggunn]

I am talking about the first operation that the family had at Playa Bush.

OK, but which one was it, the one on the water or the one across the road? Both of them have been there a long time. I don't specifically remember there being anything there in 1978, though we went down the road (it was just a sand track, actually) to the Punta Celerain lighthouse. There was a small Mayan ruin between the road and the water about halfway from the corner to the lighthouse; I guess it is still there. We discovered what is probably the largest Ceiba tree on the island about halfway across the island on the south part of the loop. We still stop to see it on our traditional around the island excursion on every trip to Cozumel, but it is hard to get to now since it is on the old road.

There was nothing at Chankanaab but a restaurant where you picked a fish for the grill from a stone tank, and I snorkeled in the lagoon. When we were out fishing, we stopped for lunch at what I think was Playa Palancar, and the deck hands snorkeled for conch and lobster. Ashore there were grills where they cooked just caught dorado and lobster, and made ceviche with the conch; I have a shell from one of those conch on my mantle today. My favorite dish in restaurants was the turtle steak.

We stayed at Cabañas del Caribe, which was north of the north marina, across the street from the Lobster Shack. The palapa restaurant at Cabañas was a great place to feed stale bread to the tangs and sergeant majors in the morning and to watch the sunset. They had underwater lights and after dark big tarpon would cruise around in their glow.

There were no cruise ships; Cozumel was a very different place.

 

[El Graduado]

Those are all nice memories, but as with all memories, there are some things that don’t fit the reality of the past. It happens to everyone; I am not picking on you. I much prefer researching old documents written at the time of the event or looking at photographs to interviewing folks about their memories for just that reason.

For example, cruise ships started coming to Cozumel in 1967 with the Ariadne. The MS Bolero called on Cozumel from 1973 to 1976. In 1977, the 464-passenger MS Odessa and the 300-passenger MS Kazakhstan began carrying cruisers on trips to Cozumel from New Orleans and Tampa. Both ships were operated by the Black Sea Shipping Company of the USSR. By 1978, Cozumel had established itself as an important cruise ship destination. In that year the island had six regularly scheduled cruise ships making stops: MS Renaissance, MS Vistafjord, MS Southward, MV Mermoz, SS Stela Solaris, and the SS Universe. I used to go aboard the Russian ships for their buffets when they came to port. The other ships were not so accommodating.

The Maya ruin on the way to Faro Celarain (it is still there) is known variously as “Ruina del Islote” “Punta Islote,” “Tumba de Caracol,” and “El Caracol.” There are a lot of myths connected to this ruin, which I mention in my book, The True History of Cozumel. I also surveyed the site in the 1970s, finding two large limestone phallic columns in the dunes (since carried off by someone) and the remains of four other structures (small oratorios) half covered by the dunes next to the “Tumba de Caracol.” I included a map I made of the site in my book that I just cited. I used to go down that dirt road frequently to eat fried fish with Primo, the lighthouse keeper. I also used to go into the selva past the Ceiba tree to explore the ruins of Hacienda Colombia, with its cemetery and its Decauville locomotive rusting away in the bush.

You don’t specifically remember Rastas being there in 1978, because it wasn’t. Even their own Facebook page says it was started in 1987.

You might have come to Cozumel for vacation with your parents in 1978, but I was living on the island before you first came and I was investigating its secrets firsthand, even back then. I published my first map of Cozumel in 1977, the “Brown Map of Cozumel.” Stores sold it to tourists for one dollar. The 18-inch x 22-inch map showed all the island’s ruins, beaches, dirt trails, and commercial establishments, even the Caballo Blanco, the island’s whorehouse. The city fathers asked me to leave the whorehouse out of the next edition of the map, which I did.

Attached is a part of my map's index from the 1977 edition, showing the town's bars. Big Rocky later closed and the space became the first Carlos & Charlie's in Cozumel. I miss Big Rocky's. I had my regular table on the balcony and would sit there and watch the world go by...

 

[gopbroek]

Angela told me her father William worked for the state and came to the island as an administrator with the project to put in the airport runway. When did the current runway (commercial side) get put in?

 

[El Graduado]

Angela told me her father William worked for the state and came to the island as an administrator with the project to put in the airport runway. When did the current runway (commercial side) get put in?

The second runway at CZM airport was finished in 1931, shortly after the first runway was finished in 1930.

Below is a condensed version of a description of CZM airport’s history, from VOLUME 2 of my book, The True History of Cozumel:

On February 19, 1929, Pan American Airways purchased Compañía Mexicana de Aviación for 100,000 dollars. Immediately after that, Compañia Mexicana de Aviación purchased 160 hectares of land north of San Miguel from the Joaquín brothers and began to build a new airfield where passengers could board a Mexicana flight to Mexico City via Mérida. From then on, Mexicana maintained the Pan American terrestrial airport facilities on Cozumel and Pan American maintained the seaplane facility on Isa de la Pasión.

Once the first dirt runway at the Cozumel airport was finished in 1930, Compañía Mexicana de Aviación began flying a regular route between the island and Merida with a 14-passenger Fokker F-10.

Oscar Coldwell’s seaplane ramp at Calle 5 Sur on the Malecon opened a year later and then the Cozumel airport’s second dirt runway was added just to the south of the first one, giving it the V-shaped runway configuration it has now.

Permission to improve the strip was requested by the US and granted by Mexico in August 1941, as well as the rights to use the Pan American Airways’ field at Merida until the work on the Cozumel field was completed, which was expected to take about a year. The US government planned on contracting Pan American Airways to perform the work on the Cozumel airstrip. Pan American, in turn, would subcontract the work to its Mexican subsidiary Compañia Mexicana de Aviación. Consequently, and all work was to be done at the proposed San Miguel airbase by a Mexican company utilizing Mexican labor, as required by the agreement with Mexico.

In November 1942, W. L Morrison, the manager and director of Compañia Mexicana de Aviación’s construction projects at Tehuantepec and Cozumel, was summoned to the office of Mexico’s Secretary of Defense, ex-President Lázaro Cárdenas, the very man who nationalized Mexico’s oil reserves and ended US and other foreign oil company operations in Mexico in 1938. Morrison was also told to bring the construction plans for the Cozumel field. When Cárdenas was shown the airport construction plans, which included a number of buildings Mexicana was going to build in addition to improving the runways, he wanted to know why all the structures were needed, since Mexico had never agreed to allow American servicemen actually stay in either Cozumel or Tehuantepec. Cárdenas said the agreement was only that they could use the airstrips in transit. The Mexican government’s position was that no foreign troops, even if they were Allied troops, would be allowed to man any bases on Mexican soil.

Cardenas then informed his US counterpart that he had halted construction of the two bases, claiming it was only a temporary interruption while they studied the matter. However, the authorization to continue construction never came. In order to protect the Yucatan Channel from German submarines, the US began flying anti-submarine missions out of Cuba and the Cayman Islands, countries that welcomed the presence and protection of the US military. By December 1942, the tide of the war was turning in favor of the Allies. The idea of building an airbase on Cozumel was abandoned.

In 1964, Mexicana de Aviación found itself on the brink of bankruptcy, so it sold its airstrips in Tampico, Veracruz, Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche, Mérida, Tapachula, and Cozumel to the Mexican government to raise cash.

The Cozumel runway was significantly lengthened in 1966 and paved for the first time. Up until then, the runway had been dirt. The airport underwent another round of improvements in 1975.

Buy my book to read much more of the TRUE history of Cozumel!