Word: presidio
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Lying some 60 miles off the southwest coast of Cuba, the lush island-formerly known as the Isle of Pines-is swept by breezes scented by countless pine trees and grapefruit groves. The island has an unsavory past: before Castro's revolution it housed the Presidio, one of the most brutal prisons in the Western Hemisphere. Castro was incarcerated there for 20 months...
They also fill many jobs that nobody else wants, even in a period of high unemployment. Farmers near Presidio, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, learned that lesson while cooperating with a local INS crackdown on undocumented laborers from the nearby Mexican town of Ojinaga. The growers took out newspaper advertisements requesting 4,000 domestic agricultural workers at the minimum farm wage of $2.20 an hour. They got 300 replies. Finally the growers were allowed by the INS to import the help they needed ?from Ojinaga...
...Sixth Army has a new life-and-death assignment: guarding what may be the most imperiled of the more than 2,000 American plants on the endangered species list. The last-known Arctostaphylos hookeri ravenii, commonly called the Presidio Manzanita, is located on a hillside overlooking the Pacific at the Army's Presidio base in San Francisco...
...Spanish for "little apple"-a reference to the tiny berries nestled amid the 4-ft. shrub's shiny green leaves and pink blossoms. Indians used to boil manzanita leaves to make a medicinal tea to treat venereal disease. There are about 50 types of the plant, but the Presidio variety has been dying out as developers paved over its habitat...
...Army is keeping the exact location of its shrub secret to protect it from plantnapers. Already, people have been spotted skulking around the Presidio base in search of it. "It's quite a handsome ground cover and would make a nice addition to someone's garden," says Rare-Plant Expert Alice Howard. What will happen if the Sixth Army gets hard pressed? Threatens Howard: "We'll call out the vigilante corps of the California Native Plant Society...