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Wilma still changing the face of Spring Break hotspot

Hurricane Wilma ravaged Cancun where beaches, tourism and the economy are still recovering. When they do, the students will probably be priced out of a fresher, more expensive resort area.

By TAMARA LUSH
Published March 3, 2006

CANCUN, Mexico - About this time last year, Evelia Pacheco spent most of her nights luring college students away from the clubs and the hip hop music and the tequila shots just long enough to weave neat rows of braids into their sun-streaked hair.

She made $50 on a regular night, $80 on a good one. Between that and her husband's salary as a maintenance worker at the Ritz Carlton Hotel, they were able to easily care for their five children.

This year, there are few students, fewer braids and even fewer dollars.

Last October, Hurricane Wilma ravaged most everything here in Cancun.

The beach resorts, which annually attract 2.3-million visitors and contribute to the region's $4-billion in tourism revenue, were hit particularly hard. Much of the beach was sucked out to sea. Of the 30,000 hotel rooms in Cancun, about 50 percent still aren't open - and the area is heading into Spring Break, normally one of its busiest seasons of the year.

Tourists are beginning to trickle in. Folks from cold places like Minnesota and Boston are here on reduced-price tour packages, happy to soak up the sun on the beach - even though they have to wander around the bulldozers and backhoes to get to the surf.

But Pacheco, a bellwether of sorts for the local economy, is lucky if she makes $10 a day. And her husband is earning half of his salary - about $250 a month - because the Ritz still isn't open.

"People here live on tourism," said Pacheco, 34. "If there is no tourism, there is no money."

Thirty years ago, Cancun was a small village flanked by an even smaller barrier island on the edge of the Caribbean Sea. Although the island was narrow, it sported white sand beaches and electric-blue water.

Developers and government planners capitalized on the natural beauty and backfilled part of the 15-mile island to make room for hotels.

In the mid-'80s, as drinking ages rose in the United States, the under-21 set discovered the area. By the early '90s, MTV broadcast its annual Spring Break bacchanalia from Cancun In 2002, about 120,000 spring breakers flooded Cancun's main tourist area, called the Zona Hotelera, (Hotel Zone). Two students died and 360 were arrested.

"It was difficult to move on the street," recalled Marcos Constandse, an architect and Cancun native.

Then came Hurricane Wilma. Forty hours of rain and 140-mph winds.

"Cancun is definitely facing a crossroads," said Constandse, who works for Grupo Ritco de Eco-Desarrollo, the area's largest eco-resort developer. "All of the hotels are either remodeling or changing their facilities. It's going to bring a newer, fresher Cancun."

And a more expensive one.

Tourism experts predict that the college set will be largely priced out, as $500,000 condos replace the party palaces of the past.

Instead of ramshackle daiquiri bars, gleaming new restaurants offer Argentine steaks.

"A few years ago, it was like T-shirts, T-shirts, T-shirts in one of the most beautiful malls," said Gabriela Rodriguez, the secretary of tourism for the region. "Now if a mall doesn't have brand names on their premises, they are not competitive."

Rodriguez said she hopes to retain some of the Spring Break market - but think rich, international students in Miami Beach, not high schoolers in Panama City Beach.

"Cancun is going to be more for higher quality tourists," she said. "The rates are not going to go down."

The spring breakers are already responding. Last year, the numbers had dropped to 40,000 and tourism officials and students think this year's number will be even smaller.

"The crowd seems to be going to Acapulco," said 21-year-old Brian Gottwald, a college student from Boston.

As Gottwald sipped a beer in the near-empty lobby of his hotel, he said he was impressed by the beach, but was a little disappointed by the lack of young partiers.

"Cancun has gotten a little played out," he sighed.

Rafael Canul is typical of the thousands of workers who stream into Cancun's Zona Hotelera each day.

Canul, 24, makes $8 a shift working in the laundry room of the Hotel Solaris. Six days a week he feeds a good portion of the hotel's 14,000 towels and 11,000 sheets into machines that wash, dry and press each piece.

He is among the lucky workers who have gotten their jobs back after Hurricane Wilma - although he didn't work for three months while the hotel repaired damage.

During that period, he scrambled for occasional maintenance jobs and studied to be a computer technician.

"I want a better job," he said.

Canul's friends have tried to encourage him to cross into the United States illegally to work. Canul knows that with his hotel experience, he could make a lot more there. But he refuses to make the journey.

"I am too afraid," he said.

But others are tempted. Each day, at least 500 men gather in the parking lot of a shopping plaza in the city center. The buildings nearby are dirty and rundown, a world away from the manicured greens of the resort strip.

The men wait for construction contractors or other bosses to drive up and look for workers.

Everyone - from the sad-eyed men waiting in the parking lot to Canul to Pacheco, the hair-braider - is waiting for the future of Cancun to arrive.

The waiting isn't easy, or lucrative. Pacheco has sold some of her household belongings to feed her children, ages 8 to 19. She is banking on the coming weeks of Spring Break to bring money into her house, a one-room apartment she shares with nine other people. The family certainly needs the money, because soon there will be an 11th person - her son's 16-year-old wife is pregnant.

Lately, Pacheco has noticed something different about the tourists: they are richer, and travel to and from their hotels in fancy tour buses.

The tour operators bring them to the markets and the clubs with $35 cover charges - and never, ever, do the tourists see the tarp-covered shacks in the city that people like Canul and Pacheco inhabit.

"The tourists are not free to pass by the hair braiders," she says.

So she worries. Maybe in the new Cancun, the tourists won't want braids at all.

[Last modified March 3, 2006, 18:59:02]