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# 14-00000![Victim: The corpse of Luciano Nieves]![Cuban roots: Anti-Castro marchers]trouble is brewing. Last week, NEWSWEEK'S Miami bureau chief, William Schmidt, filed this report:The strong, sweet smell of Cuban coffee forms an invisible but pungent border around a 600-block section of downtown Miami known as "Little Havana." There the refugees from Castro's Cuba are prospering amid a profusion of their own restaurants, shops, pharmacies, factories, construction firms and banks. The exiles have become so visible and so successful that last year the Dade County Commission passed a resolution proclaiming Metropolitan Miami officially bilingual and bicultural. "The Cubans," says Bernardo Benes, the Cuban-born vice president of a local bank, "fit in perfectly with the stories you Americans like so much-the stories of Horatio Alger."![THE CITY OF MIAMI INCORPORATED DADE CO. FLORIDA]![Reboso: Joining the mainstream]But not everyone in the Miami area appreciates the Cubans' accomplishments. In fact, the refugees are beginning to encounter an anti-Cuban backlash. The friction between Cubans and their "Anglo" neighbors is different from the problems faced by most minority groups in the nation, if only because here the Cubans have become the majority-52 per cent of the population in Miami, 55 per cent in suburban Hialeah. But their numbers and their success are the heart of the problem. "I've never seen anti-Cuban feeling so bad," says Rafael Villaverde, a Bay of Pigs veteran turned community organizer in Little Havana. "Before, the Cubans were competing for low-level jobs. Now they're competing for the job of bank president, corporation executive, even mayor. We are starting to step on toes."The Cubans are themselves divided over the issue of U.S. détente with Castro's Cuba. More and more exiles are grudgingly giving up the notion of liberating Cuba any time soon-but there are those who refuse to concede defeat. Last month, that difference of opinion apparently led to a killing in Miami and the threat of more violence to come.Scuffle: Much of the Anglo-Cuban rancor has been erupting in changing neighborhoods. In one southwest Miami community, Cuban and Anglo families have been feuding for months; in January, a shot was fired during one scuffle. "There is a real bitterness now in many middle-class white communities," say Miami attorney William Colson, "especially among people who grew up here and whose neighborhoods have become mostly-Cuban." Late last year, the mayor of Hialeah, Dale Bennett, publicly bemoaned the fact that "hundreds of old-timers have moved out because of the Cubans." Warned Bennett: "The people who have come in from Cuba would like to take over the State of Florida and turn it into Cuba. But unfortunately [for them] this is America."Mis. Mary Orwick, a longtime Miami resident, agrees, "I don't even know what the store signs say," she complains, "and the people refuse to speak anything but Spanish. This is our country. Why should I have to learn Spanish?"That is one of the non-Latins' most persistent complaints. A particular target of their outrage has been a bilingual education program requiring thousands of English-speaking children in eight elementary schools to learn Spanish while Latin students are learning English. Last November, the Anglo community rose up to elect to the school board a vehement opponent of such programs, replacing the board's only Cuban-American member. So far, he has had no luck in getting the program curtailed, and the resentment persists.Killing: Many Cubans these days do not cling as tenaciously as they once did to the notion of going back to a liberated Cuba: "Morally, we are still at war with Castro," says Max Lesnick, Cuban publisher of the Spanish-language magazine Replica. "But realistically we know the situation is different. We have been in Miami for a long time. We pay taxes here; our children go to school here. This is where we live." The diehards, however, are not so realistic. Two weeks ago, Luciano Nieves, 43, a former captain in Castro's army, was shot to death in a Miami parking lot only a few days after Replica quoted him as advocating peaceful coexistence with Cuba. The killing, police believe, was the work of anti-Castro terrorists who may have been responsible for as many as 50 bombings during the past year. A few days after the murder, a "hit list" was issued targeting a dozen other prominent exiles.Despite their fraternal struggles and their fierce ethnic pride, the Cuban-Americans are steadily moving into the American mainstream. What they need now is political power. "We were economically successful, years ago," says Miami city commissioner Manolo Reboso, who in 1973 became the first Cuban-American to be elected to office in Florida. "Political power did not seem important at the time." Currently, Cubans account for only 16 per cent of the registered voters in Miami and 25 per cent in Hialeah. But they are beginning to sign up for U.S. citizenship in record numbers and to demand jobs as civil servants, policemen and teachers. The Cubans may never jump into the melting pot, but they have what it takes to claim a place by the fire.Newsweek, March 17, 197532