Martin Vandenberg has a routine marriage and an unremarkable career as a professor of Latin American Studies at a small southern California college. To save himself from the ennui of mid life, he heads to Cuba on sabbatical where he will write a book about Cuban icon, José Martí. Soon after arriving in Cuba, he is led into the underground world of Havana's Malecón where he comes face to face with his long-sheltered sexual feelings. Leo Flores is a young, unemployed artist adept at the Cuban game of love and survival. With both men longing to be free, though in very different ways, the things they do to help each other are also the things that can destroy them.