he brightly lit rehearsal studio at Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts is a long way from a Havana carnival, but the twisting Cuban dancers shaking the room with sweat-inducing batidora (the supersonic Cuban hip vibration) and screams of agua! and asesina! are doing their best to bring one to life.

It's not hard. For many of the people in this rehearsal for Miami Libre, the original musical that tells the tale of a Cuban musician who crosses the Florida Straits seeking freedom and success, this show is the story of their lives. And whatever happens after the production opens for previews Friday, just being here is a dream come true.

In the back, Jorge Gomez, the show's composer and co-creator, stretches to watch the dancers strut and pose in Ven Pa' Miami, Gomez's song about his dreams as a striving musician when he arrived in this seductive city eight years ago.

''More! I don't believe you!'' yells choreographer Rolando Ferrer, who went from working on Cuban state television with some of these same dancers to cleaning hotel bathrooms in Miami, and for whom this is his first dance job here.

Just nine months ago dancer Juan Carlos Nicot Vernier, long and lean and prone to sudden laughing leaps, was huddled on a boat between a terrifyingly vast sea and sky en route to the Florida Keys.

Everlayn Borges, of Matanzas, whose musician father disappeared trying to cross the ocean and who defected from a Cuban revue in Mexico when she was only 17, may gleam with sexy confidence as she practices the female lead of Maria. But she bursts into tears when she talks about Miami Libre.

''It's a dream come true,'' says Borges. ''I'm sorry,'' she continues, sniffling. ``I haven't been able to move on and forget. When I heard about this [show] I think I have to do this. I always hope one day I can tell this story.

``And it is not only me -- a lot of Cubans have a story to tell. We are unfortunate people being brought up in this way, living in such a communist country. But we are also so fortunate, because we have so much story to tell.''

The producers at the Arsht Center are hoping that kind of authenticity and intensity -- and the vibrant rhythms and moves of Cuban music and dance -- will carry Miami Libre far beyond its three-week run at the Arsht Center and the presumably sympathetic audiences it will find here. They plan to tour the show nationally and internationally.

''It's a huge risk,'' says Arsht Center interim CEO Larry Wilker. ``But they didn't build this center to just do touring productions.''

''There's a huge thirst for Miami and Cuban culture in Europe and Asia,'' says Scott Shiller, Arsht Center executive vice president. ``We're trying to capture the essence of Miami and take it out into the world.''

STRAITS TO MIAMI

Miami Libre tells the story of Pepito, a young Havana musician who leaves behind his love Maria to take a raft to Miami, where he struggles and eventually finds success. It's structured more like a nightclub show than a classic stage musical. Gomez's timba band Tiempo Libre will play live. The Knight Concert Hall will be transformed into a cabaret, with a temporary floor laid over the regular concert seating, replaced by tables and chairs. There will be a full bar, and audiences will be encouraged to stay afterward to dance to Tiempo Libre's music, particularly at 11 p.m. weekend shows.

The story mirrors that of Gomez, whose Tiempo Libre has earned critical acclaim and produced two Latin Grammy-nominated albums. Gomez came to Miami by plane in 2000 after five years in Guatemala, instead of on a raft directly from Cuba. He struggled at first, working as a gardener and house painter. He played with Mexican bands in Palm Beach, and when he got a job with Cuban singer Albita, he would spend more than $100 in taxi fare to get to rehearsal because he didn't have a car.

''At the beginning it was difficult not to lose hope,'' Gomez says. ``But I knew that music was the only thing that could help me.''

Timba, the intense, intricate dance music of 1990s Cuba, had already brought Gomez and many of his countrymen through the ''special period'' of economic chaos and despair on the island. ''[Timba] was our support in a difficult situation,'' Gomez says. ``If we didn't have anything to eat, at least there was timba to listen to. If there was nothing to do, there was timba to dance to. If there was no work, we played to have fun and forget our pains. And on coming to the United States we wanted people to know this story, not just this musical style, but this part of our lives.''

Gomez found a supporter in Elizabeth Sobol, who fell in love with Cuban music in 1999 and went from managing famed classical music clients like Itzhak Perlman as a managing director of IMG Artists agency to working with Cuban artists in Miami in 2002. Sobol was moved not only by the band's music, but also by the stories of Gomez and his compatriots. She was convinced that, coupled with the enthusiastic reaction of audiences around the country to Tiempo Libre shows, their music and experience could have wide appeal.

''These stories are so powerful,'' says Sobol. ``They're universal immigrant stories. A lot of people have told the story of Cuba up to 1960, the golden age. No one has told the story of what has happened since then, or what's happening now. These are people who left everything behind, and through love and faith and hard work they're triumphing. It's an American story.''

One of the few Miami Libre performers not born in Cuba is its star, 20-year old Cuban-American Jencarlos Canela, who plays Pepito. An actor in the popular Telemundo novela Pecados Ajenos, a budding recording artist and a sometime model, Canela, whose father came from Cuba on the Mariel boatlift, says he's been both inspired and humbled at being in this show.

''I am very proud to be American, but that doesn't change the fact that my parents and my roots are from Cuba,'' Canela says. ``This has been a huge awakening for me. The responsibility is so big. It's honoring not only those who came for a better life but those who never made it.''

TAKING SHAPE

Miami Libre began to take concrete shape last fall, when a colleague of Sobol at Princeton Entertainment, which produces concert tours with the likes of Andrea Bocelli and Cher, put her in touch with Wilker. Around the same time, Sobol contacted Toby Gough, a British writer and director who has created three successful touring Cuban dance and music shows with performers from the island, including the long-running hit Lady Salsa. Gough, already experienced in Cuban music and dance's appeal, came to Miami last February for a Tiempo Libre concert and was hooked. ''That did it for me,'' Gough says. ``I thought if they can make that many people go crazy it'll be easy.''

Part of the attraction for Gough, whose productions build music and dance numbers around real-life stories, was the chance to show the other side of the Cuban story. ''All my shows in Cuba have to be passed by the official censors,'' he says. ``This is the first time I get to tell the story about Miami and Havana. I'd never been to Miami -- I never met people who arrived before.''

He had, however, met and worked with a number of people in Miami Libre in Cuba, including Ferrer, who was a choreographer for Cuban state television when he created the dances for Gough and Lady Salsa. Frustrated by shrinking opportunities, Ferrer defected in February 2005 while working in Mexico, and walked across the U.S. border.

''I was shaking, thinking the worst things were going to happen to me, that heaven and earth would open up,'' he says. But he never considered turning around. ''No!'' Ferrer shouts. ``I know that whatever I was going to face will be easier than going back.''

He had worked his way up from cleaning bathrooms to assistant manager at a Holiday Inn when a dancer in Miami Libre whom Ferrer knew from Cuba told him about the show and its director. 'I e-mailed him, and Toby called and said, `I want you with me!' '' Ferrer says.

Not only does Ferrer have experience with everything from rootsy folklore and rumba to showy mambo and cha cha, but he also knows the exuberance and repression of life on the island, and the pride and struggle of trying to make a life outside it.

''We are going to express in the show not only our best moments but the really deep feelings you keep inside of you that you are not able to express,'' says Ferrer. ``The things that we are not allowed to say.''

For Vernier, who still shudders as he recalls the enormous waves and endless sea on his voyage across the Florida Straits, the experience of dancing in this show is enough.

''It's incredible, incredible,'' he says. ``When I got this, I feel it because I lived it. It's really, really wonderful to have this experience.''

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