JOHN WOLIN Herald Staff Writer

The mayor and I didn't get off to the best of starts.

Nothing personal, Raul Martinez would say later.

No offense taken, I'd answer, though not quite sure I was ready to lower my guard.

I had just been named editor when Martinez made his play last November.

"Get Dick Capen on the phone," he ordered his secretary. Within minutes, The Miami Herald's publisher was on the line.

With Herald reporter Marie Betancourt sitting on the other side of his desk, Martinez told Capen he believed the Herald's Hialeah bureau should be run by a Latin.

You've had a black in there, Anglos in there, it's time for a Hispanic, Martinez said. Hialeah is mostly a Hispanic city, the mayor continued. How will an Anglo editor understand this city's problems?

don't know how Capen answered him. Had Betancourt not told me what happened, I guess I never would have known. But I'm a guy who needs to know why someone is trying to kick him around. When I found out about Martinez's call, I called him -- my curiosity and anger in a close race to the phone.

Hey, Mr. Mayor, I said, give me a chance. I'm fluent in Spanish, speaking it before I spoke English, calling myself Coco as a child.

I was on the first jet ever hijacked to Havana, a Pan Am 707 taken about two minutes outside of Mexico City.

I learned to ski at La Playa de Varadero on Cuba's north coast east of Havana.

Eduardo, our favorite waiter at Lila's restaurant in Westchester, knows my child well enough to carry her into the kitchen -- though he did predict she'd be a he.

Though I am not Hispanic, I told the Cuban mayor, I do care. If there is a story to be told, it will matter not whether it is about someone with whom I share a common culture.

Nothing personal, the mayor said.

And so we began to get to know each other.

Hialeah is very important to us. Martinez knows that.

I'm the mayor, he has said. I make the news.

Sometimes he goes on to say that he needs us a lot less than we need him.

hat puts us in an untenable position. It is not our nature to grovel for news.

We must and will cover the city of Hialeah, with or without the mayor's cooperation.

But I'm not looking for a fight. The mayor and I talked earlier this week and we're both after the same thing. He wants more Hialeah news carried in The Herald's daily local news section. I want my reporters to write those stories.

He'd like more good news. So would I. But we cannot ignore the aspects of Hialeah the mayor might prefer to leave uncovered. The Herald's recent series on zoning is an example.

Raul Martinez is a proud man, one I believe is loyal to his city. Yet his reaction to the series has been to attack The Herald, without for a minute even contemplating the possibility that the wrongs it detailed accurately were portrayed. He reacts much the same way to what he deems are negative stories in Neighbors.

I hope the mayor can someday come to believe that we, too, care about Hialeah and its people. We simply show it in our own way.