Just off the cruise ship, the American tourist got in line at the automatic banking machine, but he had a question before he put in his card.
“This give dollars?” he asked. “I just tried another machine, and it only gave out their money.”
“They,” I quickly assumed, were Mexicans, and “their money” was pesos. But it took me a bit longer to figure out why this guy came all the way to Mexico and needed only dollars.
He either didn’t plan to spend money during his morning-to-evening stay on the island–once a scuba diver’s haunt but now among the top cruise destinations in the Caribbean. Or he didn’t plan to spend any money in the mom-and-pop shops that don’t take dollars as the chain restaurants do.
With tourism recovering from its post-Sept. 11 jitters, travel analysts say cruise ships are among the fastest-growing sectors of the industry. But while they offer the fun, sun and security that many tourists want, many people on this island said they don’t always help Americans reconnect with the world.
While Cozumel has boomed with the arrival of up to five cruise ships a day, islanders lament that most tourists who disembark already have purchased tour packages on the boat for their daily activities. They quickly board vans and taxis and disappear to the resorts. Few venture more than a block or two into town beyond the glittery harbor-front promenade.
A good part of the income, therefore, is channeled into a few businesses that benefit a few families on the island, and not the rest of the native population or the thousands of Mexicans who have come to search for work that is scarce on the mainland, the residents said.
“There’s no interchange. The people who come in the cruise ships aren’t interested in that,” said Paloma Cazares, subdirector of tourism in Cozumel, which is developing a master plan to promote island culture and try to spread out the tourism benefits. “Before, people had a lot of friendships because of this interchange.”
Cazares conjectured that the tourists buy the prepackaged island visits because they are sold on the boats as being “safer.”
Some friction has developed, as in other island tourist destinations. The tension is especially palpable among the community of scuba divers, some of whom make mischievous suggestions about what to do with the tour boats.
“My idea is to sink one of the cruise ships out on the reef, and then we can dive on it,” said one dive shop owner across the street from a restaurant recommended for its local Yucateno cuisine. “Some of these people are too scared to walk two blocks into town.”
Cozumel might be almost unrecognizable for anyone who hasn’t been back to visit in the past 10 years. The island now boasts more than 50 hotels and a population of 80,000, and officials struggle to provide services such as garbage disposal.
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Last year, 1,300 cruise ships pulled into the main city’s docks, most of them direct from Miami or the Bahamas. The visitors can enjoy an impressive new marine park, an excellent reef for diving and lots of jewelry and cowboy boot stores along the promenade.
Daily life follows the cruise boat schedule. The jewelry stores open when the first cruise ship drops anchor. Residents virtually roll up the sidewalks when the last ship pulls up the gangplank, essentially taking its own hotel, casino and dance floor with it into the night.
That has put a damper on nightlife. The small restaurants and stores have had to raise prices to make ends meet. The dive masters say their daily $35 paychecks aren’t enough for them to afford the $4 drinks sold at the popular bars in town.
And the pace of island life has accelerated, leaving the locals hustling sometimes to keep up, such as the waiter serving a family of tourists at a beachside restaurant recently.
“Where’s that water?” the father figure kept barking, having come off the beach in his straw hat with an urgent thirst.
The problem wasn’t that the waiter wasn’t hustling. It was that everybody else at the table ordered Sex on the Beach, a popular resort cocktail served inside an entire pineapple, and the waiter had to make three trips to the table juggling one in each hand.