No, not on a raft under the Biscayne Bay Bridge. These Cubans are rich and coming to CBS’s Prime Time in a new show called Cane. A drama about a well-to-do Cuban-American family torn by “male tension” as its sugar and rum businesses are passed down to the next generation, is part of the new fall schedule presented at the upfront in NYC last week.

With Miami as its backdrop, the show has a star-studded Latino cast — including Jimmy Smits, Rita Moreno, Hector Elizondo, Nestor Carbonell and Miami local Paola Turbay — and executive producer Jonathan Prince says that the script will be as exceptional.

”It’s like The Godfather if Vito Corleone had passed the family business to Michael, but Sonny and Fredo were still alive and pissed off about it,” Prince told The Miami Herald. Personally, I find this show quite similar to ABC’s “Brothers and Sisters” where a wealthy San Francisco family is shaken up when the patriarch of the family passes away and the family inherits a winery and canning fortune. Great drama that airs on Sundays after “Desperate Housewives” and stars Sally Field, Rob Lowe, Rachel Griffiths and Calista Flockhart to name a few.

The Miami Connection

Nice surprise for us here in Miami as it seems that CBS’s love affair with our beautiful scenery, year round beauty and home-grown production talent will continue with this series. For us Cubans, it will be the first network series to focus on the evolution of the Cuban exile experience over the past five decades rather than the immigration which gets the most attention today. Prince said, “It will educate the rest of America about everything from the Pedro Pan exodus of children from Cuba to the tension between those who left the island and those who stayed.” This method of historical fiction has become popular…I call it the Forrest Gump. Reason being that during the FG movie, we saw historical footage of Kennedy, Nixon etc. with Tom Hanks in the background.

”It’s not a documentary; it isn’t on PBS,” he said. “But it’s a family drama dealing with how families really act. There will be a lot of scenes at the family dinner table, and among the things they’ll talk about will be what happens when Fidel Castro dies, who will take over, and if it’s Raúl, what does that mean. That will be in the show because those are some of the things Cuban-Americans talk about in real life at dinner.”

Well, I can’t begin to imagine that they would show footage of my Cuban mother screaming at me to eat my “bistec empanizado”, so hopefully they are scripting up something nicer. However, they say that even the language will be authentic: The show will sometimes use subtitles as characters weave between English and Spanish. Can you hear my mom now? “Coño Diego, cómete el bistec”. We’ll see what happens with the accents as those are usually painful. Let’s not forget Scarface.

”I don’t think TV has ever done a show about an upscale Latino family,” Prince said. ‘Latino families on television are hardscrabble. We talked about making the family Mexican, Venezuelan, even Guatemalan. Then Nina Tassler told Cynthia, `You’re Cuban, why aren’t you writing about Cubans?’ ”

In Cane, Smits will be the focal point of an ensemble cast that plays a family ridden with tensions and jealousies. As patriarch Elizondo is dying, he chooses his son-in-law (Smits) rather than one of his own children (Carbonell and Turbay) to run the family business.

The pilot episode of the series was shot in March, with cast and crew working two days in Miami. The producers plan to return to South Florida on a schedule similar to that of CSI: Miami, taping here about two weeks out of every eight.

”We want to use a lot of Florida locations — South Beach, the Intracoastal, sugar fields, all kinds of stuff,” Prince said. “We want the sky to look like a Florida sky and the water to look like Florida water. Florida’s different — we can’t shoot the Intracoastal in Long Beach. Well, I guess we could, but it would look ridiculous.”

Along with the local scenery, Prince wants to use local talent and is speaking to Gloria and Emilio Estefan about working on the show’s soundtrack. Ironically enough, one of the characters will own a SoBe nightclub, so music will play a pivotol role not only in the storyline of Cane, but in setting up the ambiance and feeling that is exclusive to Miami.

Catch a preview below.
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- Written by Miamiadguy