Seventeen-year-old Sonia, a medical student with dreams of becoming a modernist painter, is caught up in Fidel Castros revolution from the moment it captures Havana on New Years Eve 1958. While her eccentric mother hatches an increasingly desperate series of plans to flee Cuba, Sonia joins the militia and volunteers as a medic at the Bay of Pigs where she encounters her mortally wounded high school sweetheart as an enemy fighter, then is arrested and tortured for treating another CIA-trained brigadier. Scarred, yet clinging to her revolutionary ideals, she seeks fulfillment in an artists collective, only to be further disillusioned by increasing repression under Castro. Finally, she flees to America where she has been a painter and influential arts activist.