Ruben lives in Cuba and Andy is exile in the United States. Both are trapped by history at opposite poles and want to change places, but they can't do it.
A left-wing intellectual, faced with the imminence of his arrest during the coup d'état against President Joao Goulart, lives anguished moments of definition. To the collapse of his small universe is added a conjugal confrontation that unmasks him mercilessly.
A bourgeois Cuban family of aristocratic origin locks itself into its mansion when the Cuban Revolution comes to power, waiting for the new regime to be overthrown. As time passes, they regress to older and older systems of policital order, from capitalism to feudalism to "primitive savagery."