Henequen and Cenotes
Hacienda Cuzama
A necessary part of free market economies is change. Industries grow and industries die. Compassionate societies have safety nets to help those who are dislocated by dying industries adapt to the change. Shortsighted societies try to eliminate the dislocations altogether.
Henequen Processing Equipment inside the Abandoned Hacienda
The Yucatan has gone through its own dislocation. For the past 100 years, a primary agriculatural product has been henequen. The fiber from the leaves of this agave plant was used for making rope. Thousands of campesinos worked the fields, processed the fibers and spun the rope.
Henequen Plants
With the advent of synthetic twine, the henequen industry has been dying for years. The Mexican and Yucatecan State goverment artificially propped up the industry by paying the campesinos, but there was little market for the fiber. Finally, about six years ago payments to campesinos stopped.
Sign Post Discouraging Littering
The campesinos in the pueblo Cuzama have adapted. The horse-drawn rail carts that used to carry loads of henequen now are full of tourists who are pulled past the abandoned henequen fields out to a series of cenotes, undergound freshwater sinkholes, perfect for swimming.
Cenote
Cenote
We took the cenote tour today. Delfino and his son Carlos were are drivers. They were quite gracious.
Our Driver Delfino
Delfino's Son Carlos
Delfino says he makes as much as when he was working the fields. It isn't much, but at least he can stay in his village with his family, rather than traveling each week to work in Cancun or leaving his family altogether and working in the United States.
The only part of this new tourist enterprise that needs work is there is still only one track. So when a cart that is coming meets a cart that is going, one of the carts has to be lifted off the tracks so the other can pass.
Car Passings