The Immorals

Already in his first novel The Immorals (Los inmorales) (1919) Carlos Loveira reveals himself to us as a remarkable novelist with a considerable sociological background.
This work contains characteristics and themes of the naturalist current such as anticlericalism, workers’ struggle, social criticism, reformism… Thus Loveira seeks to express a reality that is in crisis.
The Immorals (1919) reflects on the questioning of morality, especially that associated with the institution of marriage – whose legal dissolution had finally been accepted when the Divorce Law was enacted in 1919.
Here Carlos Loveira proposes as a thesis to get rid of the obstacles that the institution of marriage imposes on both men and women.
The plot of the novel revolves around the story of Elena and Jacinto victims of social morality. Elena is married to Pepe, a cold and conceited boy who values neither Elena’s intelligence nor feelings. Jacinto, on the other hand, marries Ramona, humble and simple, who, in turn, does not share the interests or concerns of her husband. As a couple, Elena and Jacinto share ideas and tastes but cannot live together in Cuba.
Marcelo Pogolotti wrote about the novel The Immorals by Carlos Loveira:

“When Jacinto is laid off, his domestic difficulties are aggravated along with the economic ones. His wife does not take charge of the real reason for the misfortune that occurred, thus widening the distance that separates them, already opened by all kinds of differences of opinion, motivated by a great cultural unevenness and the superstitions that overwhelm the wife. The situation, previously made more bearable by the lack of financial problems and mitigated by the absences imposed by the nature of the driver’s work, is becoming intolerable. The husband ends up finding the desired understanding in Elena, dominated by the same intellectual concerns as him, and also married to a person who is not related to him. Both resolve to join and go to Panama with the money generously offered to the machinist by their companions, by virtue of that “Freemasonry”, so called by the author, then existing among the railroad workers, which had more brotherhood than guild, and which in the republic of now is strictly codified under the label of union subsidies. The vicissitudes of the couple in their wanderings through South America constitute the high price of their illegal coupling and allow the author to make a defense of divorce. Glimpses of the distressing and precarious existence of Elena’s relatives constitute an argument in itself convincing. Loveira presents the master husband, who uses his father’s prerogatives to tyrannize his own, slapping and insulting his daughters with the most profane words under the pretext of saving his morals, being himself a vicious. The woman submits with resignation, in the belief that she is doing her duty. The children live oppressed and “educated” by this ignorant father, unable to earn a living by his carpenter’s trade. The novelist also reveals, with extraordinary acuity of observation, the humiliations to which poor women are subjected in Cuba, even by their class equals; and vividly illustrate the ordeal of the weak, if unprotected; or of the woman alone, especially when traveling, in the first decades of the Republic. At the same time it ridicules legislators who vote against divorce but seek extramarital pleasures.”