When her country is taken over by socialist revolutionaries, a wealthy woman can't bear to give up all of her wealth and possessions to the new government, so she hides all of her treasures in the 12 chairs of a dining-room set. After her death her nephew finds out what she had done and, since the chairs had been "nationalized" and are now in the possession of a dozen different people, he sets out to track them down and get the treasures he believes rightfully belong to him.

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 political order, from capitalism to feudalism to "primitive savagery."

A sculptress marries out of interest in order to have the money that will allow her to give the education she desires to the young boy she has chosen to, in a certain sense, mold to her liking and thus give him her love when he becomes a man. She succeeds in part, but then the boy is reconciled with the young woman who truly loves him the sculptress ends up dying in the embrace of the sculpture that reproduced him.

The film takes place in 1850, Texas, United States. Louise, daughter of the wealthy plantation owner Poindexter, master of the hacienda Casa del Corvo, falls in love with a poor mustanger Maurice Gerald. The night their secret rendezvous happens, her brother Henry disappears. Suspicion in murder falls on Gerald, who was found covered in blood, with signs of struggle on the body and on Henry's cloak. One more minute, and an angry crowd would have Gerald lynched, but then the mysterious Headless Horseman appears...

Carlos, a former factory worker of humble origins, has made millions - but the upper class refuses to accept him as one of their own. Meanwhile, Barbara, the spoiled daughter of an industrialist, is to enter into a loveless marriage of convenience. Tensions arise when the two fall madly in love.

The adventures, fortunes and misfortunes of resourceful peasant Juan Quin Quin - in turns bullfighter, guerrilla fighter and sacristan - who never resigns himself to his fate. Set against the backdrop of 1950s Cuba and steeped in the island's countryside traditions, this comedy is considered the first successful Cuban experimental film.