Sirk's last film before fleeing to the U.S. features Zarah Leander, who became a star overnight with Sirk's To New Shores. Like the previous film, La Habanera is structured around music as much as around dialogue, and is an equally bitter criticism of colonialism. Leander plays a Swedish girl who visits Puerto Rico with her aunt and stays on to marry a wealthy landowner. The marriage proves a ten-year disaster. Her Swedish temperament is as inappropriate to the sultry heat as her husband's plantation tactics are to the welfare of the people when he tries to cover up a plague so as to preserve his fruit exports.