I Wonder...... ? ? ?

[Darol]

I wonder if Mr. Cousteau were alive today to see the havoc wreaked upon his beloved
Cozumel Reefs by human intervention, if he might have had second thoughts about
turning the world on to them?

 

[Ministryofgiraffes]

Nah.

 

[El Graduado]

Don't believe the BS you read on the internet about J. Y. Cousteau making a documentary on Cozumel, or any of the quotes about Cozumel's reefs that were supposedly made by him. They are pure fiction; fables created to enhance Cozumel's image by a fictional association with a man who the promoters perceived as famous; people with no regard for facts. The first time Cousteau came to Cozumel was for a one day trip during a CMAS meeting that took place from December 1 through December 5, 1980, in Cancun. The Calypso was not with him. He made a few staged photos with some models and left. He did not name Palancar Reef, he did not make mentions of black coral that were published, and he did not "put Cozumel on the map". Cozumel had a thriving diving community and many successful dive shops during the 20 years prior to his one-day trip in 1980.

 

[Darol]

The reefs of Cozumel are dying, and as a diver it breaks my heart. The closing of some southern dive spots will do nothing to stop the inevitable. The dives we have made recently have had at least twice the number of divers on the sites.

 

[ggunn]

The reefs of Cozumel are dying, and as a diver it breaks my heart. The closing of some southern dive spots will do nothing to stop the inevitable. The dives we have made recently have had at least twice the number of divers on the sites.

Agreed. I do not believe that the White Blight has anything to do with divers.

 

[gopbroek]

Don't believe the BS you read on the internet about J. Y. Cousteau making a documentary on Cozumel, or any of the quotes about Cozumel's reefs that were supposedly made by him. They are pure fiction; fables created to enhance Cozumel's image by a fictional association with a man who the promoters perceived as famous; people with no regard for facts. The first time Cousteau came to Cozumel was for a one day trip during a CMAS meeting that took place from December 1 through December 5, 1980, in Cancun. The Calypso was not with him. He made a few staged photos with some models and left. He did not name Palancar Reef, he did not make mentions of black coral that were published, and he did not "put Cozumel on the map". Cozumel had a thriving diving community and many successful dive shops during the 20 years prior to his one-day trip in 1980.

Be glad he did not make it to Cozumel, he might have dynamited a passage thru Palancar reef and he may very well have been a Nazi
Cousteau was anti-semitic and a liar, says biographer
The guy I respect is Pablo Bush, by all accounts an average diver but with access to resources to allow the initial exploration of Cozumel's reefs. He went on to create Akumal and Puerto Aventuras, from what I can gather

 

[mediumone]

. He went on to create Akumal and Puerto Aventuras, from what I can gather

Create Akumal??

Akumal has existed for a long damn time, although the population used to be somewhat different than it is now.
It was a Mayan community. The Mayans were offered too good of a deal to pass up. Who'd want to live on Half Moon Bay, when you could easily move to Akumal Pueblo in all it's squalor?

The more well off and educated were lucky enough to create the new town of Chemyul, which has paved roads and is at least surrounded by lush jungle vegetation.

History is often rewritten when it concerns indigenous people, isn't it?

 

[M-Cameron]

I mean you are talking about the guy who used dynamite to blow up reefs, and murdered sharks whole scale......so I’m not really sure he’d have a leg to stand on

 

[NDL_Diver]

Yes, it was a different era in the 70’s.

He did alot of damage in the interest of science. Reading the things he done, some discussed here, he did more damage than all the divers in Cozumel for the last 20 years!

He loved to use dynamite to count fish species.

 

[El Graduado]

The guy I respect is Pablo Bush,

Akumal has existed for a long damn time, although the population used to be somewhat different than it is now. It was a Mayan community. The Mayans were offered too good of a deal to pass up. Who'd want to live on Half Moon Bay, when you could easily move to Akumal Pueblo in all it's squalor?

I have a different view of Pablo Bush Romero than you two.

First, he did nothing to promote Cozumel or its reefs. Nor did he “discover” the island. He only came to Cozumel after it was brought to his attention in 1958 by Bob Marx. Marx was illegally excavating the wreck Matanceros near Akumal while he was living on Cozumel between early 1957 and late 1959. The Mexican government got wind of it and stopped him. Bush heard about the incident and formed a nonprofit “scientific” diving club (CEDAM) with which he was able to use to get permission from the government to salvage the wreck in late 1959. That’s when he first came to Cozumel and to Akumal; two years after Marx already had started his dive shop (based in the old Hotel Playa) on Cozumel.

Akumal in 1959 was part of a long strip (12 kilometers) of cocales (coconut groves) along the coast, belonging to Argimiro Argüelles. There were no towns or villages located in this property, only a very few scattered temporary huts of the coconut workers. Bush bought the property from Argüelles, but did not register it properly. The land’s title has been in dispute ever since. The people who now live in the “shanty town” off the outskirts of Akumal were workers who came to work on the construction of Akumel’s hotel in the 1960s and stayed to work there after it was constructed. None of those families were living in or near Akumal before Bush bought the property in 1959. They were not forced to leave area around the bay; they never lived there in the first place. They began (and continue) to try to wrest title for their small plots from Bush and later administrators, but since he didn’t have clear title, they couldn’t get one either. It has been a simmering mess for decades.

Problems over this land started in 1972, when the government cast a covetous eye on Bush's Akumal property. That’s when they told him that even though he bought the property from the original landholder, he didn’t have clear title. The president then was Luis Echevarría. You may or may not remember him from his “Mexico Pride” movement. He was the one that promoted pride in being Mexican and the idea of being proud of “mestizaje,” the blending of the Spanish and indigenous Mexican races. Remember the little gold and black “Made in Mexico” stickers with the Aztec eagle symbol? That was established during his presidency.

Echevarría’s government began a campaign promoting “mestizaje pride” that included government subsidies to artists and writers to produce works that glorified this idea. Poets were paid to write poems about it, artists were commissioned to create statues commemorating it, and newspapers were paid to publish articles about it.

The false narrative of Gonzalo Guerrero was created during this period by hacks paid by the government. Most of it came from the pen of a reporter for the Mexico City newspaper El Universal in 1974. Mario Aguirre Rosas published what he described as Gonzalo Guerrero’s diary, supposedly written on deerskin velum and sheets of 16th century paper. No one was able to examine the original manuscript, as Rosas said it belonged to a private collector and only he was allowed to see it. This purported autobiography of Gonzalo was full of fabricated details, which have been repeated ad nauseam by uninformed, amateur historians who read the mendacious tale and believed it to be authentic. It is in this fairy-tale invented by Aguirre that the myth Gonzalo’s wife was a princess named Zazil was first started, as well as many other details about the man that are patently false. In 1975, two thousand copies of Gonzalo de Guerrero: Padre del mestizaje iberoamericano by Aguirre were printed in Mexico City by Editorial Jus. The book was simply a rehash of his newspaper articles about his spurious autobiographical document of Gonzalo Guerrero.

When Pablo Bush saw how much the president was pleased by the effects of the poems, statues and newspaper articles, he decided to offer up something along those lines in an attempt to curry favor with the president and perhaps hold onto his land at Akumal. To that end, he commissioned a statue of Gonzalo Guerrero be made and erected at Akumal by the artist Raúl Ayala Arellano in 1974. Bush also gifted a copy of the statue to the federal government. Another copy is here in Cozumel and a fourth in Merida.

This was not the only time Bush paid for a monument to be erected to a fictionalized character. Read in my book, The True History of Cozumel, about how Bush erected a statue to Jean Laffite in Dzilam de Bravo, falsely claiming the pirate had died in that locale, when actually it was his brother, Pierre Lafitte, who died near there.