When his father dies, a Cuban man who was raised in the United States, learns that he was not abandoned by his mother but illegally taken out of Cuba. He goes back to the island and is helped in his search by a cousin and a taxi driver.

In Santa Fe de Tierra Firme, an imaginary Latin American country, the indigenous dictator Santos Banderas rules with an iron fist. A group of rebels trying to seize power by force while some liberals try a change of government legally.

The Castro revolution was just consolidating its power when, in 1961, over 100,000 students were sent from their schools into the countryside to teach the peasants there how to read. Coinciding with the Bay of Pigs invasion, in this docudrama, 15-year-old Mario (Salvador Wood) has come to a tiny village in the Zapata swamps and gradually wins the villagers over to his task. At the same time, he receives an education in the realities of rural life from the hard-working peasants.

Traces episodes in the lives of three Cuban women, each named Lucía, from three different historical periods: the Cuban war of independence (with Spain), the 1930s, and the 1960s.

During the last days of the struggle against dictator Fulgencio Batista, a young peasant woman joins the guerrilla in the Sierra Maestra.