BY GLENN GARVIN

They've done everything they can to make it authentic, from hiring a dialect coach to ensure Spanish is spoken with a Havana accent to making hundreds of expensive color photocopies of Cuban tile to dress the set walls.

But, the producers of Cane -- the new CBS series about a family of Cuban-exile sugar barons in South Florida -- warn that their show is ultimately a drama, not a documentary.

''I hope Cubans like it. I hope they're proud,'' says Cane creator Cynthia Cidre, herself an exile from Little Havana. ``I'm Cuban. But it has to appeal to the whole country, not just Miami.''

Cane -- which debuted Tuesday on WFOR-CBS 4 -- has stirred intense interest in South Florida since its May announcement. It's the first prime time drama on a broadcast network about not just a Cuban family but a Latin family of any kind. And it's coming to America's top-rated network with an all-star cast that includes Jimmy Smits, Rita Moreno, Hector Elizondo and Nestor Carbonell.

Its marriage of a Cuban exile rags-to-riches story with the lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-treacherous traditions of nighttime soap operas like Dallas and Dynasty has attracted at least one backhanded vote of confidence in its authenticity. Palm Beach's Fanjul family, which controls the giant Flo-Sun sugar conglomerate and 400,000 acres of cane fields -- threatened legal action unless CBS moved Cane's lying, cheating, murdering Duque clan to another community. (The network complied.)

But local blogs and message boards have bristled with suspicion that the show will offer a phony Hollywood picture of South Florida's Cuban-American community. It's a fear born of bitter experiences both great (the mad-dog narcotraffickers of Scarface) and small (the Cuban-American cops on Showtime's Dexter who speak with obvious Puerto Rican accents).

CASTING CATCALLS

The concerns only heightened with the news that Cane's cast is mostly composed of Puerto Ricans, Colombians and Mexican Americans. ''What's the matter, CBS?'' sniped www.blogcritics.org. ``Can't find any good Cuban-American actors around?''

Cane's cast and producers say they are befuddled by the criticism -- that if there's anything to be worried about it's the reverse, that most of America will find the show, with a mostly Hispanic cast speaking enough Spanish that the dialogue sometimes has to be subtitled, to be too authentically Latino.

''Is America ready for this?'' ponders Cidre. ``I don't know. That's a big question. I hope so. The 200 people who work on the show hope so. CBS, which is putting a bundle of money into this, certainly hopes so.''

Moreno, who has collected an Oscar, a Tony, a Grammy and two Emmys during her nearly seven decades in show business, says Cuban Americans and other Hispanics should be thrilled, not skeptical, about Cane. ''They're going to see a Latino family that's elegant, articulate, proud, wealthy and well-dressed,'' she notes. ''We've never been seen this way on American TV. That's what attracted me to it in the first place. I wanted to do a show where'' -- she lapses into an exaggerated barrio accent -- ``we dun tak like thees all the time.''

The criticism that the Cane team finds most nettlesome is the one over casting of other Hispanics to play Cuban Americans. ''Did they hire lawyers to be in the cast of L.A. Law?'' sarcastically wonders Jonathan Prince, one of Cane's executive producers. ``Did they hire doctors to play all the roles on ER? I guess I missed the day that Hugh Laurie [the British actor who plays an American doctor on Fox's House] became a U.S. citizen.''

Cast members say that restricting roles by ethnicity or national origin would be a double-edged sword that would be disastrous for Latino actors. ''If you can only play what you are in real life, I'd be limited to playing a married Colombian woman with two children,'' says Paola Turbay, the Key Biscayne resident and former Miss Colombia whose role in Cane is her first big break in English-language TV. ``An actor has to be able to do all kinds of roles.''

That doesn't mean no one at Cane cares whether the show rings true. Producers hired a dialect coach to work with the cast on Cuban (and, for British actress Polly Walker, who plays a business rival of the Duques, cracker) accents. Ad-libbing Spanish catchphrases has been encouraged, and the show's Cuban-American actors point out to the rest of the cast when Mexican or Puerto Rican slang is infiltrating the mix.

''The writers have been really great about letting us add on our own little touch, as long as the script's point is gotten across and we protect the story,'' says Carbonell, the Cuban-American actor who plays a conniving Duque son. 'We do it constantly. Sometimes I'm saying, `You might want to do it this way, or say it that way,' and everybody's been very attentive.''

WRITER'S ROOTS

The ultimate safeguard is Cidre, who created Cane and heads its writing staff. Born in Havana, educated at Miami Senior High School and the University of Miami, she's writing about her own roots. And she's amazed that no one has ever used the Cuban exile experience as the framework for a family drama.

''I don't know why it didn't happen before,'' Cidre says. ``It should have happened before.

``Rum and sugar -- everybody knows Bacardi. People coming to this country with nothing but the shirts on their backs, then making it all back. The political angle. The whole feeling of paradise lost. . . . The struggle is probably the same for every group of immigrants. But Cubans do consider themselves political refugees. That's part of the melancholy and the nostalgia. Cubans always thought they would go back.''

That exile experience is an integral part of Cane. Characters make frequent reference to how the Duque family patriarch Pancho, played by Elizondo, escaped from Cuba in a small boat carrying nothing but a handful of sugar seedlings. (The character's biography is even printed on the labels of the fake rum bottles that litter the Cane set.) And his son-in-law Alex Vega, played by Smits, is a Pedro Pan kid, one of 14,000 sent alone to the United States by parents who didn't want them raised in Fidel Castro's Cuba.

''Eventually we'd like Alex to go back to Cuba and see who he is,'' Cidre says. ``That Pedro Pan thing has always stayed with me, I don't know why. My own parents balked about doing it with me. But every time I write about Cuba, I use a Pedro Pan character.''

Ironically, Cidre, who's written several movies (including The Mambo Kings) and produced TV miniseries about Cuba, was looking for another subject when she first pitched the idea of Cane. ''I thought I'd done enough Cuba, enough already,'' she recalls. ``I wanted to do other things, Anna Karenina, cop shows.''

She originally envisioned a show about a Mexican-American family in the grocery business, headed by a character loosely based on Arturo Moreno, the advertising magnate who owns the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. 'But when I turned in the script, [CBS programming boss] Nina Tassler said, `Why are you writing a show about Mexicans? You're Cuban. Write what you know,' '' Cidre says. ``So here we are.''