Set in Cuba in early 1959, although the historical context is deliberately avoided in its epic backdrop, the story follows the persecution of a poor guy who owes a few pesos to a loan shark and a thug who swear to get even with him, not so much because of the unpaid debt as because they don't want to set a precedent. The man's name is Miguel, and he seems to care as much as Santiago Nasar that the killers are hot on his heels with their half-tone shoes. On the day of his "double crime" (the story recreates those 24 hours), he has a couple of drinks in a bar, argues with his ex-lover, has sex with a young prostitute, puts up with a scolding from his friend Pedro for being negligent, walks, urinates, goes to bed...

After several years of retirement, Roco decides to make a new film. To achieve this, he reassemble his crew: cinematographer Larsen, Nacho the cameraman, soundman Meta and Cacho, the ever loyal machinist. But social and personal crises have dispersed the strange and remote territories of reality. Sometimes dramatic and and sometimes funny, Roco's search will lead him to an unavoidable encounter of life, death and rebirth.

At a rundown bus station in rural Cuba, the line of passengers waiting just keeps getting longer. The problem is that every bus that passes by is already full. Their only hope is to wait for the station's bus to be fixed. As the disparate group settles in, relationships start forming between the passengers: Emilio, a young engineer, becomes smitten with a beautiful young woman who is en route to meet her Spanish fiancé, a blind man gets support from the others to go to the head of the line. Frustration and disorder reign when the one bus brakes down and no one can leave. Resigned to working together, the group magically transforms the station into a beautiful place where no one wants to leave.

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."