During the Cuban Revolution, four young people's lives are changed in ways that are very different. Ana's father supported Fidel Castro as a guerrilla soldier in the mountains. Now that he's returned, he realizes he'd been duped and the change he desperately wanted to see won't happen. Miguel is sent with thousands of other children to Miami to live in orphanages in order to spare them the worst of the fallout, and they must somehow learn to survive in a new country without their families. Juan is torn apart when his best friend joins the pioneros, a militaristic youth organization backed by the socialist government. Zulema, who lives in rural Cuba, finally gets the opportunity to read, but she only gets access to government-sponsored propaganda. Their experiences, which reflect the experiences of many who fled or stayed behind, affect them for the rest of their lives and live on in the stories told by their children.