Canadian Firms Help Cuba `Mine' Wrecked Galleons -- Castro Wants Billions Of Dollars In Sunken Spanish Treasure

There's gold under the Straits of Florida, maybe billions of dollars in sunken treasure, and Cuba is determined to get it.

Desperate for money, Fidel Castro's government has turned to Canada to help salvage gold, silver and historic artifacts from hundreds of wrecked Spanish galleons.

"The find is potentially huge. There could be as much as $400 million from a single wreck, and we know that hundreds of Spanish ships were wrecked while carrying treasure to Havana," said Ian Rigg, director of Terrawest Industries of Vancouver, B.C., the first foreign firm allowed to hunt for treasure in Cuban waters since Castro came to power 39 years ago.

Gold bars, silver coins, ancient swords and gem-studded jewelry already have been retrieved from galleons wrecked centuries ago along the shipping routes that once linked Spain to the New World.

After looting the Aztec, Inca and Maya cultures in Mexico and Peru, the Spanish piled their treasure onto great fleets that assembled in Havana harbor before returning to Spain. Hundreds of ships were lost near Cuba - plundered by pirates, sunk in battle, wrecked by storms or ripped apart by shallow reefs.

For almost four decades, Cuba fended off foreign treasure-hunters, using patrol boats to shoo away fishing vessels or other craft that lingered too long offshore.

Castro, himself an experienced diver, limited the search to an elite unit of Cuban divers.

Underwater tracts opened

Now these underwater tracts have been thrown open to Canadian mining companies, which are using the same salvage methods that recovered pieces from the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion.

The treasure hunt reflects Cuba's growing partnership with Canada in defiance of the U.S. economic embargo.

After two years of searching, Terrawest has turned up 23 wrecks yielding about $500,000 in jewelry, gold bullion, silver bars, gemstones and artifacts.

This impressive haul, however, is not enough to justify the cost of a full-scale search, which can add up to $50,000 a month.

Some of the wrecks found so far have already been plundered over the centuries.

Many contain jewelry, coins and valuable artifacts, but not the big payoff that treasure hunters dream about.

The Canadians and Cubans still hope to uncover at least one treasure-laden wreck that would vindicate years of expense.

The Cuban government, eager to widen and deepen the search, last February allowed a second Canadian company, Visa Gold Resources of Toronto, into the hunt.

The contract, similar to one with Terrawest, would give Cuba half the value of any findings. Visa Gold's costs would be reimbursed from the other half. Anything that remains would then be split between the company and Cuba.

While a U.S. embargo forbids Americans from doing business with Cuba, the Canadian government not only allows but encourages trade, commerce and joint research projects.

Canada has swept into the economic void, more than doubling its trade with Cuba from $313 million in 1994 to $713 million last year.

"We want to get on with it, the way capitalists do things," said Doug Lewis, president of Visa Gold and a former Canadian minister of justice.

U.S. treasure-hunters for many years have yearned to harvest the Cuban coast.

"Overtures have been made from Cuba to have me come down there," Mel Fisher, the premier American treasure-hunter, said. "I was reticent because the U.S. government has laws against that. I didn't want to get the U.S. government or the Cuban exiles mad at me."

Fisher speculated that 85 treasure ships went down around Havana and many more sank off other parts of Cuba.

He said the wrecks will produce riches, though perhaps not on the scale of the sunken Spanish galleon Atocha that he discovered off Key West in 1985. The Atocha yielded treasure estimated at $400 million.

"They've located a lot of wreckage, brought in gold bars and beautiful things," Fisher said of salvage efforts in Cuban waters.

"That's lousy diving, though. Filthy water. Lots of sharks and stuff. Not ideal conditions."

Cuban waters are considered potentially bountiful because they lie along the main shipping routes that linked Spain to its colonial capital of Havana during the heyday of Spanish plunder from the late 1500s to about 1825.

Cuba's elite diving unit, operating out of a government-run company called Carisub, have found undisclosed amounts of treasure over the past 17 years, mostly from wrecks in shallow waters.

Layers of sand and coral

But many wrecks remain buried under layers of sand, coral and debris. New equipment - computer-tracking programs and advanced scanners - will help find these wrecks and see through the muck that covers them.

"Now, for instance, you can feed information into a computer about the likely route and the last location of a ship to plot your searching lanes," said Ed Burrt, vice president of operations for Visa Gold.

"This is not just a snatch-and-grab operation," Burrt said. "If you bring up gold bars and cash them in, once that's spent you've got no more income. But if you put gold bars on display in a museum as a document on history, people will come and pay to see that year after year after year.

"This is where the money is going to be made."