Mambo Wetlands Walk
Francisco Raya
A successful protest meeting was held today at the Mambo wetlands site at 11 am to discuss the lodging of a DA for the site by the new owner. Speakers included, the PS Mayor Ryan Palmer, Councillors John Nell, Jaimie Abbott, Giacomo Arnott, representatives of the PS Koala Protection group, Ecconetwork and our own Nigel Waters. The meeting was chaired by Kathy Brown and about 300 enthusiastic people turned out in the middle of a Grand final long weekend. The sausage sizzle and the coffee van did a roaring trade and the hat was passed around raising nearly $1,400.00 for the campaign ahead.
We received A passionate email today HERE from a resident of Foreshore Drive that he has given permission to use, to assist in our submissions objecting to the sale of the 6 hectares of land in the wetlands currently owned by the Education Dept. who, it seems, have instructions from Mr Baird to sell off all surplus land.
The land for sale includes seven lots, with six of the lots between 657m and 680m in size and one lot being 5.6ha in size (182 Port Stephens Drive). The sites are all zoned E2- Environmental Conservation and are currently heavily vegetated. Port Stephens Council owns the sites to the east and west of 182 Port Stephens Drive (see diagram below). The minimum lot size for subdivision of these lots is 40ha, with all of the lots being under this requirement.
Council has not received any planning proposal to rezone the land or has had any meetings regarding the future development of these sites. The site is noted by the Office of Environmental Heritage as having high environmental value.
TRRA contacted Walter Lamond, Chair of the 355B Landcare Group that has been caring for the site on behalf of the local residents for the last 20 years and he indicated that although they were aware of who owned the land, they had no indication that the department had now designated the land as surplus to requirements and that it was to be sold off in an online auction on 9 June 2016. He also indicated that an application
The Mambo Wetlands Community Group has set up a Facebook Page and have arranged for NBN3 TV to cover a meeting they are having on Saturday 14 May 2016 at 10:00 am at the site and have asked concerned people and local Community Groups to show support.
Below is the link to Facebook for the community forum to save mambo wetlands. This will be held on Thursday 26 May at horizons golf club. 5:45pm for 6pm start.
Any troubl verity the link to the lease go to mambo wetlands community Facebook page for more information
Just before dawn one day in late April 2012, four young Cubans stood on an otherwise deserted beach, peering hard into the Caribbean darkness. They were trying to escape their native country, and they were waiting for the boat that would take them away. Thirty minutes passed, then 60. Still no boat. Three men and one woman, the group had arrived at the designated spot close to the appointed hour: 3.a.m. By design, the rendezvous point was located on one of the most isolated coastal stretches in a country famous for nothing if not isolation -- so remote it could be reached only by foot.
They had spent the previous 30 hours hiking there, without sleep, and had reached varying levels of emotional distress; the stakes were high. Covert interests in Miami and Cancun had made the arrangements from afar. Their goal was to extract from Cuba a baseball player of extraordinary talent and propitious youth. Just 21 years old at the time, Yasiel Puig already was well-known to both Cuba's millions of fervid baseball fans as well as officials high in the hierarchy of the Cuban state-security apparatus.
MLB Home With Puig was Yunior Despaigne, then 24. A former national-level Cuban boxer and a friend of Puig's from their teens, Despaigne had spent the previous year recruiting Puig to defect, under the direction of a Cuban-born resident of Miami named Raul Pacheco. If caught and found out as an aider and abettor, Despaigne would inevitably face serious prison time. He and Puig had together made four failed attempts to escape the island over the previous year. The authorities were almost certainly wise to their machinations. They needed this trip to work.
According to Despaigne, in the escape party were Puig's girlfriend and a man who, Despaigne says, served as a padrino, or spirit guide, a kind of lower cleric in the Afro-Catholic religion of Santeria. Sometime before this latest escape attempt, Puig and his girlfriend had sought out the padrino; a vatic ritual had revealed that their voyage would end in good fortune, Despaigne says. The couple decided to take the padrino along so as to improve their chances for safe passage.
From the start, the journey had seemed both hexed and charmed. Two days earlier, they'd hitched a ride from Cienfuegos, the city they all lived in, to a sleepy seaside hamlet called Playa Girn, where, around nightfall, they were supposed to meet the guide who would leave them to their smugglers. Instead, they spied what appeared to be a squadron of police milling around close to their planned meeting place. They drove past without stopping; they placed a few frantic cellphone calls; they managed to reconvene with their guide 35 kilometers up the coast in the town of Playa Larga. But almost immediately, right near the beach, they ran into two policemen. Among the guide's first instructions: "Run!" They ran along the beach and then into the sea -- it was tranquil and waveless there -- and waded in water up to their necks. They could see police on land trying to pursue. Dogs barked, and the beams of flashlights played in the air and on the water. When they saw the lights range over the water, they dived. Eventually, the police gave up, but the Cuban coast guard did not. The guide's course took them along the edge of a fjord-like inlet that cuts deep into the country. On its western side stretches a vast Evergladian swamp -- the Cinaga de Zapata, one of the most prodigious wetlands on earth. It was slow going. During daylight hours, they picked their way through dense mangrove thickets, careful to keep their distance from the packs of crocodiles that lazed in the lagoons and among the marsh grasses, and careful not to walk on the beach, far easier though it would have been, and risk exposing themselves to the coast guard making regular patrols just offshore. At nights, they resumed hiking along the beach, occasionally plunging into the water up to their noses, driven there by swarms of mosquitoes.
Now, at the rendezvous point, dawn broke. In the gray morning light, the group came to a decision. Despaigne and Puig, veterans of the defection process, knew that the smugglers who helmed these vessels, lancheros, as they're known across Cuba -- would almost assuredly not want to risk capture by attempting a daylight pickup. And so the group decided to give up. They would surrender. All were severely dehydrated, and starving, having ditched their provisions when they were forced to run from the police into the sea. They would start walking back toward the nearest settlement, some 40 kilometers in the direction they'd come, and in the meantime attempt to flag down one of the patrolling coast guard ships. Better to go to prison than die in the Cinaga de Zapata.
Puig's journey from the Cuban town of Cienfuegos to U.S. soil was fraught with peril -- and, in its own way, charmed.
1) Puig and three companions hitch a ride from Cienfuegos to Playa Giron, where they were to meet the guide who would lead them to their rendezvous point with the smugglers.
2) Dissuaded by the presence of police in Playa Giron, they continue by car to Playa Larga, where they finally meet their guide.
3) The group heads south along the coast, hiking through dense mangrove thickets and occasionally swimming -- a trek of some 30 miles.
4) On a barrier island at the mouth of the Bay of Pigs, they meet up with their smugglers and set off in a cigarette boat for Mexico.
They'd walked about 400 meters when the padrino stopped; he said he had to go back. At the rendezvous point, he'd left something important behind: the figurine of Elegua, a Santeria deity, Lord of the Crossroads, a powerful spirit in the faith's pantheon of them -- in the words of Despaigne, also a believer, "the one who opens and closes the way." You don't leave Elegua behind. All four turned around and trekked back, except the guide, who at that point had had enough and abandoned the group. They found Elegua resting safely on the sand; Puig was the one who reached down and picked it up. That's when, raising their eyes to the Caribbean horizon one last time, they saw it. A vessel. It appeared to be approaching. At first they thought: coast guard. But as it drew nearer its details emerged: 40 or 45 feet, outboard engines of many growling horsepower -- a long, lean, late-model cigarette boat, "like the ones you see," Despaigne recalls, "on Miami Beach."
The lancheros wanted ID confirmation, and before anyone knew it, Puig, Despaigne, Puig's girlfriend and the padrino had waded out and climbed aboard to meet their ferrymen. As Despaigne and the rest would later learn, these men were the leaders of an alien-smuggling-and-boat-theft ring with links to the Mexican cartel Los Zetas. At least two were fugitives from American justice, their names on the wanted lists of several law enforcement agencies. The lancheros apologized for their lateness; they'd gotten lost.
As Cuba receded, the four defectors went quiet. The moment must have been bittersweet. They'd finally escaped, yes, but they were leaving home, maybe never to return. None in the group made mention of the historical import of the body of water they'd spent the last two days circumnavigating, the place where they'd officially become traitors to their country and enemies of the Revolution. They'd fled their nation through the Baha de Cochinos -- more commonly known as the Bay of Pigs.
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