According to Michael Chanan, "no Cuban film ever prodded a raw nerve more insistently that this one, revealing in the process the dangers of interfering with certain types of cultural icons.
Solás erased the most shocking element of the novel - that, unbeknownst to them, Cecilia and Leonardo were sister and brother and, thus, incestuous lovers - and inserted, instead, a subtext that emphasizes Santería as the force that shapes the destiny of the characters.
While the film shares with the novel an abolitionist stance and an abhorrence of the racist practices that permeated colonial Cuban society, it highlights the importance of religious syncretism and transculturation in a way that Villaverde's work could not.
Solás's film is a 20th-century response to a canonical text, grounded in the teachings of Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, Natalia Bolívar, Miguel Barnet and other scholars who claim that Afro-Cuban culture is an integral part of Cuban national identity.
Equally important, the projection of a religious theme on to a 19th-century-storyline allows Solás to look at something suppressed and driven underground in Cuba at the time his film was made: the continued presence of Santería as an undercurrent in contemporary Cuban culture and its power to subvert dominant paradigms.