The year is 1820, and trade between Cuba and Catalonia is a booming business, although the goods that arrive to Cuba are not always the products that were shipped, in some cases, they simply arrive "lumps" or "coal". As it appears in the logbooks of the ships. 'Havanera 1820' is a film that tells stories of love and adventure in a time when Cuba confronts the Spanish colonizers.

A bank robbery goes wrong. The robbers, two of them unemployed family men, take two hostages, one of them needing heart medication, and leave them in an apartment, tied to a bomb. The police has to find the apartment before the bomb explodes. At the same time, in the same house, two old men are solving a jigsaw puzzle, and a female cellist practices the Bach cello suites.

In 1939, Ramón was a young man, caught up in his Barcelona family's involvement on the Republic side in the brutal Spanish Civil War. He and his family fled into exile ahead of Franco's troops. Now it is many years later, and he has come back to see how his old homestead fared in the intervening years. The only person he can find who is able to remember those years clearly is his family's old butler Claudio.