Elpidio Valdés returns to the Cuban countryside to fight against the Spaniards. But they have a much more dangerous enemy: the Americans, who want to take over the island at any cost. Elpidio Valdés and his comrades-in-arms will try to prevent them from achieving their goal, with machetes in hand and bullets flying. It was conceived as a series for Spanish television and later shown as a feature film under the name Más se perdió en Cuba (More Was Lost in Cuba) in Spain and Elpidio Valdés contra el águila y el león (Elpidio Valdés Against the Eagle and the Lion) in Cuba.

Salamanca, 1973. A congressman in love with his daughter's teacher hires an assassin to kill his wife.

In Spain of the 1960s, a poor family of quinquis - a nomadic ethnic group with a tradition as old as that of the gypsises of Spain but with even more obscure origins - have a nomadic life marked by poverty. The son, Eleuterio Sánchez Rodriguez, nicknamed "El Lute", steals some chickens and is condemned to six months in jail. El Lute moves to the slum outskirts of Madrid with his common law wife, Chelo, starting an itinerant life as a peddler of pots and pans and living in a quinqui shantytown. He gradually embarks upon as life of petty criminality, eventually participating in the theft of a jewelry store during which a bystander is killed.