He was a gentleman in the highest sense of the word: elegant without discordance, courteous – neither with disharmony or excessiveness, circumspect without pomp, cultured without exaggeration, jovial without exaggeration or stridency, loquacious without being disarranged… A Criollo settled in a Cuban citizenship wide open to a life full of adventures and experiences; a true journalist, a talented writer whose novels and books confirm it-; a generous friend baptized by the name of Jaime Sarusky Miller, also known as Jimmy or The Pole.
Son of emigrants who came to Cuba from deep Poland in the second decade of the 20th century, of Jewish ancestry on both sides, mother and father -his surnames do not admit the slightest contradiction-, Jaime, as I always called him, was born in Havana on January 3rd, 1931, city where he passed away on August 29th, 2013. In the fifties, he would study French Literature and Sociology of Art at the Sorbonne University, and in Paris, in the warmth of that language, he had an exemplary of experiences and readings. Among the first ones, how significant would be the most dissimilar encounters for the young student and reporter; of those times – told in great detail, not infrequently with a humor as restful as comforting with humor as calm as it was comforting, allowed him to go back to the afternoon when he met the afternoon when he met Albert Camus in a bookshop, his classes with Michel Butor and Roland Barthes, his attendance at Gaston Bachelard’s lectures, his interview with Ingrid Bergman, or his knowledge of French cinema and its great directors.
In an interview I made to him in 2001, when he won the Alejo Carpentier Novel Prize with Un hombre providencial (A Providential Man), he said to me: “First of all, I was influenced by Flaubert, an artisan of writing, who lived as such in body and soul, always searching, to the point of exhaustion, for the precise to the point of exhaustion, the precise terms. And Stendhal, with The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma; by the way, when I was in Parma, the tower where he was imprisoned, Fabrizio, his main character, no longer existed… However, he will continue to exist in this wonderful novel.
Such encouragement of French apprenticeship in storytelling is explicit in his first novel, La búsqueda (The Search) of 1961, the story of Anselmo, a flute player in a popular music ensemble, who longs to leave it to join an orchestra of classical music – the “Máximo Centro”; however, the obstacles, -the slum where he lives, the incomprehension and hostility of his neighbors-, drove him to a self-destructive path; Jean Paul Sartre’s exergue is defining: “Once upon a time, there was a poor fellow who had mistaken the world”.
Rebelión en la octava casa (Rebellion in the Eighth House – 1967), his second novel, of expressive restraint and veiled suspicion, carried very effectively, that lead to the encounter
effectively, leading to the meeting of Oscar and Agustín, in the violent days of Havana, under the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, with an astrologer, Petronila Ferro, is a plot that, as Alejo Carpentier said, “its protagonist is a danger; danger, for two revolutionaries, of what the street means; but also danger, undefined, mysterious, strange, undefined, mysterious, astral…”.
This is what Jaime told me about the process of creating those novels: “In my beginnings, with La búsqueda, I had the insecurity of someone who is entering unknown territory, while Rebelión en la octava casa was a different experience. Exactly: between one and the other, there are not only the years going from the formation of the young writer to the powers of one who has already entered the world of fiction, but also the ways of another zone that overwhelm his writing: the exercise of the journalist.
Far beyond the reportage, from the domains of testimony, literary genre that gained notoriety in 1957 when an inaugural title, Rodolfo Walsh’s “Operación in Buenos Aires an inaugural title, -long before Truman Capote published his “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood in 1966- Jaime Sarusky inscribes his name in the most notable of that genre of that discipline in Cuban clave, with two books that combine application and enjoyment: Los fantasmas de Omaja (The Phantoms of Omaja – 1986) and La aventura de los suecos en Cuba (The Adventure of the Swedish people in Cuba – 1999).
It was the illustrious Manuel Moreno Fraginals, creator of El ingenio (The Sugar Mill), who said it best: “The issue of migration is extremely important for Cuba (…) But Sarusky is not a demographer. He knows the great importance of man/cipher, but his interest is in man/culture. That is to say, he looks for those who arrived to this land, expelled for political reasons, social political reasons, social straits or economic stifling, and came with their burden of frustrations and hopes, and generally an indomitable energy, to found and to found themselves”.
His pages dedicated to interviews and reports are also enduring, especially during his long years in the magazine Revolución y Cultura; texts of his that cover very relevant aspects of the Cuban fine arts and music -it is worth remembering also his book El Unicornio y otras invenciones (The Unicorn and other inventions), are an invaluable source for the knowledge of cardinal works and authors, apart from his very meticulous works on writers and artists from Holguin in times of foundation.
His third and last novel -undoubtedly his major piece in that order-, Un hombre providencial, is the well-documented and refined story of a 19th-century American adventurer, William Walker, determined to turn Nicaragua and its surrounding territories into an immense slave state against all odds -it is not superfluous to recall the Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo, the director of the The Battle of Algiers, with his very particular version of the character in Queimada (1969), played by the great actor Marlon Brando.
Jaime told me that he had set out to “make history from fiction, without necessarily leaving aside the historical events, and in the latter ones to insert fictional characters (…) For several years I was reading everything related to William Walker, Nicaraguan historians and North American historians. My will was to create an actual believable character and not the caricature of one more scoundrel. (…) The novel became more and more complex in the construction of its plot”.
It is worth recalling the keys to his work in his own words: “In the novel you are obliged to have a very a much more modest attitude, always behind the narrator, while in journalism the absolute opinion weighs heavily.
The novelist is someone who disappears, while the journalist is always on the scene, constantly appearing”. Thus, between his fictions, under the constant illumination of his chronicles and reports, there will remain among us Jaime Sarusky, the unforgettable Pole born who was born in Cuba.
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