Nieves was born in Havana, Cuba on August 5, 1928, to Pedro and Filomena Fuentes, two Spanish immigrants. Her full name at birth was Mercedes de las Nieves Fuentes y Lopez. Pedro was a gardener and Filomena a cook, so they didn't have much money, but they were determined to give their daughters a good education. Nieves and her younger sister, Olga, attended convent school, and then received secretarial degrees from Havana Business University. Nieves mastered English, French, and Italian in addition to her native Spanish.

Nieves went to work when she was 17 and kept working, with breaks only for maternity leave, until she was 70. She and her sister got jobs at Sabates, the Cuban subsidiary of Proctor & Gamble. In an age when women seldom worked outside the home, the two of them were able to buy a house and support their parents out of their own earnings. In 1959, Nieves married her long-time sweetheart, Emilio Luis Blanco y Sanchez. Ten months later, their daughter Alina Lucia was born.

The young family's personal happiness was clouded by national events. Also in 1959, Fidel Castro came to power. Nieves told many stories about living under Communism. One day at work, she had the contents of her purse dumped on the counter by a guard looking for evidence of sedition. The woman guard eagerly seized a pamphlet, but her face fell when she discovered it was one of theirs. Nieves was especially outraged by this incident because this Communist woman owed the family a huge debt. Emilio's grandfather had saved the life of the woman's father during the Spanish Civil War. On another day, Nieves went to the company warehouse and discovered that the cages meant to hold merchandise were full of people. The people in the cages had been her co-workers, as had the militia guarding them. Nieves normally kept her mouth shut, but that day she couldn't. She asked a young militia man how he could do this to people he had known for years. He replied that he had no choice.

Nieves and Emilio realized they had to leave their country before things got even worse. The Castro regime had already made it difficult to escape, but the borders were not yet entirely closed. So they falsified some papers to indicate they had permission to go on vacation to Costa Rica. In 1961, they took their baby girl, packed a couple of suitcases as if they were going on a trip, and left everything else behind.

After a few months in Costa Rica, they came to the United States and began rebuilding their lives. As a multilingual secretary, Nieves was able to find employment at the Miami Herald. Emilio did not speak English, so his first job consisted of bagging groceries. He built up from there, eventually becoming a salesman and entrepreneur as he had been in Cuba. In the mid-sixties, Nieves' parents, Pedro and Filomena, came to live with the family. In 1969, the Blancos had their long-delayed second child, a girl named Giselle Margaret.

Nieves became an American citizen in 1967, and legally changed her name to just plain Nieves Blanco. The literal English translation of that name -- Snow White -- was fondly played up by some of her friends. Nieves enjoyed her career, and retired as secretary to the CFO of Knight-Ridder. She was fond of mystery novels, theater, and travel, and took a keen interest in national and world events. But the center of her life was her family.

Her love, goodness, and strength will never be forgotten.