Dancing to The

By LESLIE WHITAKER

The Cubans are coming! The Cubans are coming! That is the battle cry these days of angry Mexican Americans in the Los Angeles area. The target of their wrath: local TV station KVEA, an affiliate of Telemundo, the Spanish-language television network that hit the airwaves two years ago. Although West Coast Chicanos were at first delighted to tune into broadcasts in their own language, some gradually became alarmed at what they call the "Cubanization" of KVEA, which picks up much of its programming from Telemundo's operations center near Miami. "The programming does not reflect the linguistic, cultural and ethnic communities in which these programs are shown," complains Raul Ruiz, professor of Chicano studies at California State University at Northridge, who has led numerous small demonstrations in front of the station's Glendale offices during the past four months.

The dispute illustrates how difficult it is for the broadcast and print media to build a national following among U.S. Hispanics, a geographically scattered group comprising many nationalities. "It's hard to cover all the Hispanic markets because they are so different," says Joel Russell, former senior editor of Hispanic Business. "A publication has to have one article about Chicanos in Texas, one about Cubans in Florida, one about Puerto Ricans in New York. It's too nebulous a focus."

Nonetheless, Hispanics, expected to become the country's largest minority early in the next century, are being courted by a record number of publications and television news shows. Roughly 145 Spanish-language newspapers and magazines are published in the U.S. In addition, there are some 30 bilingual or English-language publications aimed at Hispanic readers. More than 200 radio stations and approximately 50 television stations broadcast some news and talk shows in Spanish. Their potential audience is vast: the - Hispanic-American community totals 23 million and is growing faster than the general population.

Encouraged by those burgeoning numbers, some American corporations have been eagerly pumping money into a market that once consisted mainly of lackluster small-circulation Spanish dailies. In 1988 the Hallmark greeting-card company bought Univision, the largest Spanish-language network in the U.S., from a Mexican media conglomerate for nearly $600 million. The year before, Saul Steinberg's Reliance Group formed rival network Telemundo, which teamed up with CNN to produce a competing evening national news broadcast.

Large newspapers are also trying to cash in on the trend: the Miami Herald has considered circulating its daily Spanish edition nationally; the Los Angeles Times plans to make its twice-monthly Spanish insert a weekly next year. Twenty-four dailies carry Vista, an English-language Sunday insert (partly owned by Time Warner) aimed at Hispanic readers.

Many Hispanic journalists with established careers in the so-called mainstream press are attracted to these ventures because of the opportunity to focus exclusively on the Latino community. Guillermo Martinez, a Cuban who was senior editor of the Miami Herald, left to join Univision, where he heads the news department. Univision anchorwoman and producer Teresa Rodriguez has turned down offers from Good Morning, America and two NBC affiliates, preferring to cover Hispanic America in depth.

While these journalists share a commitment to cover Latin communities here and abroad, they are divided over which language is the most effective vehicle for reaching their audience. Manuel Casiano, founder of the Puerto Rican magazine Imagen, favors Spanish, noting that 97% of Hispanic adults living in the U.S. today learned that language first. Arturo Villar, founder of Vista, and Alfredo Estrada, publisher of the upscale monthly Hispanic, argue that clinging to their native language holds Hispanics back. The effect of publishing in Spanish, Estrada says, "is to support a Spanish-speaking subclass that will always be flipping hamburgers for a living." Some news outlets try to appeal to the broadest audience by using both languages.

By far the biggest challenge for the Hispanic media is winning over advertisers who question the value and size of their audience. "Corporate America thinks of some poor guy living in a barrio who just came over the border," complains Estrada, who claims that half his readers make $40,000 or more annually. To combat skepticism about their ratings, rivals Univision and Telemundo last summer jointly hired Nielsen Media Research, the television ratings service, to verify their claims. Advertising dollars aimed at Hispanics peaked at $550 million last year, according to Hispanic Business, a fraction of the national total of $125 billion. "We are nowhere," admits Telemundo president Henry Silverman. But Imagen's Casiano is decidedly more upbeat: "The numbers show tremendous potential for growth." In other words, there is nowhere to go but up.