It’s a good thing Cynthia Cidre, A.B. ’78, wanted to avoid taking a public speaking course as a graduation requirement. Instead, Cidre, now writer and producer of the CBS show Cane, took a screenwriting course with Professor Paul Nagel, A.B. ’50.

She liked the class, and she was pretty good at it, too. A month after she began graduate school, Cidre got a call from Columbia Pictures. Unbeknownst to her, Nagel had entered one of her scripts in a writing contest.

Cidre was one of 11 U.S. writers the studio selected to work on a script in Los Angeles for a stipend of $250 a week. At the end of the four-month stint, the studio would decide whether or not to buy the script. Eight years later, after many rewrites and studio options, MGM Studios bought Cidre’s script, “Little Havana.” It was released in 1991 as Fires Within and starred Jimmy Smits as a Cuban political prisoner who is reunited with his family in Miami.

Smits also plays a main character in Cidre’s latest project, Cane, which premiered on CBS in September 2007. It tells the story of the Cuban-American Duque family, owners of a rum-and-sugar business in South Florida. Alongside Smits, Cane stars other well-known celebs like Nestor Carbonell, Hector Elizondo, and Rita Moreno.

Inspired by her father, who was a sugar chemist in Cuba, Cidre drew on her own experiences of living in Cuba and moving to Miami at the age of 9. “You carry being Cuban with you till the day you die, whether you’re here or there,” she says.

Cidre’s producing partner, who was used to seeing her office piled high with books while doing research for a show, was surprised to find it relatively empty while she worked on Cane. “I was like, ‘What do you want me to research? I know the story,’” she says.

When she’s not in the writing room, Cidre can be found listening to the music selections for the show, approving the cuts in the editing room, or even picking out wardrobe and makeup.

“It’s a moving train,” she says. “You shoot every day for 12 hours a day except weekends, and each episode takes eight days to shoot. You don’t stop, you just keep going to the next one.”

—Natalia Maldonado, A.B. ’06