Carlos Loveira Chirino

One of the most relevant writers of the early twentieth century in Cuba.

Carlos Loveira was born in El Salto, province of Las Villas. An orphan from a young age and of humble origin, Carlos Loveira emigrated to the United States in 1895 with the family for whom his mother worked. At age 16, he enlisted in the expedition of General Lacret that departed from Tampa headed to Camagüey to participate in the war for independence (1895-1898) and, already in the insurgent ranks, he served in a field hospital.

Around 1903, he began working as a railroad worker, a trade he also practiced in the Panama Canal, Ecuador, and Costa Rica. He returned to Cuba in 1908 and a year later founded the newspaper El Ferrocarrilero (1909-1911). In 1910, he participated in organizing the Cuban League of Railroad Employees. After the League failed, Loveira moved to Sagua la Grande (Las Villas), a city where he resumed his union activities. There he founded the newspaper Gente Nueva, which was short-lived, and later the anticlerical magazine Cauterios, which he shared with Catalan journalist Baltasar Pagés. New setbacks led him to move occasionally to La Habana. Accused of a bomb explosion, upon returning from one of his trips, he was arrested but was acquitted at trial.

In 1913, he moved to Yucatán, where many of his comrades had emigrated. In Mexico, he was a close collaborator of Venustiano Carranza, who tasked him with technically organizing the Department of Labor in the State of Yucatán. From 1915 on, he made numerous trips to Cuba and the United States, as well as to South America (Peru, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil), in propaganda and agitation work. In Yucatán, he was part of the editorial board of La Voz de la Revolución. He also contributed to Heraldo de Cuba, El Imparcial de San José (Costa Rica), and in English, to The Federationist, the organ of the American Federation of Labor, whose congress he attended, representing Yucatecan workers.

In 1919, he participated in the first International Labor Conference of the League of Nations as a technical advisor to Cuba's delegation. He was appointed an official of the Section of Immigration, Colonization, and Labor, and between 1921 and 1926, he participated in seven international labor conferences, held in Geneva, Switzerland, about which he published informational pamphlets in 1922, 1925, and 1927. He would also travel through France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Spain, and Italy. He was a member of the National Academy of Arts and Letters and of the Cuban branch of the Royal Spanish Academy of Language.

In 1920, he published his most important work, Generales y doctores, a portrait of Cuban society in which he describes political corruption, despair, and the social dynamics through which Cuban society was being shaped in the early years of republican life. Loveira's novels belong to naturalistic and psychological realism, and abound in erotic themes, as in La última lección (1924), which addresses the promiscuous behavior of a physician. Another of his important works is Juan Criollo (1927), in which Havana and rural settings occupy a prominent place. Indeed, Loveira cultivates a raw but attractive naturalism, with a very personal style: clear, direct, and abrupt, suited to what he tells, always in defense of his ideological aims, very clearly oriented toward socialist tendencies. Thus, in his works, the most suffering humanity mingles with rancor and anguish.

He outlined the general framework and wrote the first and last chapters of the collective novel Fantoches, one of his most singular creative experiences, which was published in the magazine Social. Much of the criticism considers him the writer who temperamentally most resembles Émile Zola throughout the entire American continent. Generales y doctores has been translated into English (Oxford University Press, New York, 1965).

Loveira was an enthusiast of socialist ideas and one of the founding leaders of the modern labor movement.

Source: En Caribe