By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on February 27, 2025
Sacha
Francisco López Sacha spent the last days of his life lying in bed meekly awaiting death. He refused to eat, to drink water, to walk, when he learned that he had an illness that would lead to extreme suffering. At the age of 74, he had decided to resign from life. A resignation that became effective last Sunday, February 16th, and has moved the Cuban intelligentsia, because he was perhaps the most unanimously loved and admired of Cuban writers.
He was born in Manzanillo, in the east of Cuba, on February 28, 1950, as Francisco López Álvarez. The nickname “Sacha” —as we all called him— was acquired in pre-university, when one of his friends started to call him that because of his supposed resemblance to Sacha Distel, the French jazz musician, although the resemblance was less physical than spiritual. He wrote his first poem at the age of nine, but he loved music almost as much as literature. He had a good voice, he dreamed of being a rock and roll singer and recording, even if it was just one song, but life didn’t give him that opportunity.
His work, which includes stories, novels, essays and critical texts, is recognized as one of the pillars of Cuban narrative of all time, with essential titles such as El cumpleaños del fuego, Descubrimiento del azul, El más suave de todos los veranos, Prisionero del rock and roll and Voy a escribir la eternidad, his most recent autobiographical novel. The publishing house Letras Cubanas is preparing the publication of his unpublished novel Licor diabólico.
He was very proud of his latest novel, Voy a escribir la eternidad (2023) [I’m Going to Write Eternity], winner of the prestigious Alejo Carpentier Prize, which is an elegantly told work with a choral voice, leaps in time and a fascinating thesis: eternity is what we experience only once. That is why every human being is eternal, Sacha said. There, Cuban Manzanillo — like James Joyce’s Dublin — is the unrepeatable city whose soundtrack refers to all the music of its generation, from traditional trova to the Beatles.
Manzanillo is also the intrahistory of the Cuban revolution, which it does not reach by depoliticizing events, concealing meanings, mutilating identities, condemning the living, mythologizing the dead, but through a peculiar mixture of memory, history and autobiography, of a collective self based on the writer’s intense and intimate relationship with the life of his country.
The journey through the city, time and memory served Sacha’s literature to make inquiries such as the weight and transcendence of childhood in the definition of man’s life or discoveries such as that of love (or lack of love), assessments of music and experience, revelations dedicated to the discovery of the literary possibilities of the city. You have to tell to remember and you have to tell to understand, he said.
A great storyteller, Sacha knew how to find new ways of narrating them over and over again in his literature and in the classroom. Just to listen to him, I attended several times his Literary Techniques Workshop at the International Institute of Journalism in Havana, which he gave every year for almost two decades and in which he renewed his surprising monologues.
It was fascinating to hear him explain why there is retrospective literature made of time, and there is another no less valuable that springs from instantaneity, without mediation or distance, without the advantages of perspective, but also without the deceptions and vagueness of memory. He never stopped being a “charlatan”, as they called him when he taught peasants in the Sierra Maestra how to read and write when he was just a child. His culture and his gift for the spoken word amazed everyone, enabling him to compose an essay in an improvisation. And he never stopped being grateful that his life was spent in Cuba.
In one of his last interviews, when he was already mortally wounded and did not know it, he told the newspaper Granma that he was a very lucky man: “Because I have people who love me and whom I love, because I feel that my work has not been in vain. Because I am Cuban and I am proud of it.
Because I have had the privilege of having, among my peers, very valuable people, and that of living in the era of the Cuban revolution; also that of knowing, thanks to the revolution itself, the roots of my country’s history. And because I feel historically linked to Cuba, and I feel that, if I am Cuban and I have pain, that pain can be shared, just as I can share my joy, because I am part of a people”.
We were the lucky ones, those who knew him. Goodbye and see you again, dear Sacha.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English