The film is liberally inspired by the period when Eça de Queiroz was Portuguese Consul in Cuba and still a Spanish colony. Eça de Queiroz struggles against local authorities to defend Chinese workers from slavery on sugar plantations.

The film is liberally inspired by the period when Eça de Queiroz was Portuguese Consul in Cuba, when still a Spanish colony. Eça de Queiroz struggles against local authorities in his defense of Chinese workers, brought to the sugar plantations by greedy middlemen and exploited as slaves. Two parallel stories unfold, that of a Chinese girl which Eça de Queiroz saves from the clutches of one of the island's most powerful slave owners, and the other of a romance involving a young American woman on holidays in Havana.