Three Cubans were recently honored with the induction into the Chess Hall of Fame in America, along with ten other chess players, people and institutions linked to the game of science. The Grand Master (GM) Jesús Nogueiras, the teacher and educator Ramón Huertas Soris and the journalist, historian and writer Miguel Ángel Sánchez, received this satisfaction “for their most notable contributions and achievements in this particular field”, as expressed by the FIDE Master Gustavo Maass Garza, president of the Hall, in the act of exalting their names, held in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico1.
I dedicate these lines to one of them, my personal friend Miguel Ángel Sánchez, whose passion for chess I know well, and for this reason I consider his inclusion in the Hall a fair and deserved act. A precocious chess player, the science game formed an important part of Miguel Ángel’s adolescence and youth, who participated in the competitions held in Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s; he even became National Army Runner-up, a tournament of good level at the time.
He was a muralist (the operators of the first tournaments Capablanca In Memoriam reproduced the games on some wall boards on the outskirts of the competition room) and prosecutor, and at the Chess Olympiad in Havana he served as auxiliary arbitrator. In addition, he began his work as a popularizer by writing reviews and articles about chess competitions in different media and, particularly, in the excellent (now defunct) magazine Checkmate.
But, without a doubt, a relevant moment in his relationship with chess was the writing of the biography Capablanca, legend and realitypublished in 1987, after winning the Biography Prize of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (Uneac), a decision that corresponded to a prestigious jury made up of Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Graziella Pogolotti and Francisco López Segrera.
The book quickly sold out of bookstores, so great was the avidity of knowledge of Cubans about the great champion. The text, written in elegant and easy-to-read prose, is a rigorous investigation for which Miguel Ángel carried out a meticulous search of newspaper sources and received various help, including that of the International Master (MI) Eleazar Jiménez, a good friend, who he had bought the personal library of Dr. José Antonio Gelabert, a key figure in insular chess at the beginning of the 20th century and the first Cuban biographer of Capablanca.
Eleazar lent Miguel Ángel that set of extremely valuable specialized books and magazines, which brought together collections of chess magazines from the United States, England, Argentina and Cuba. The same was done by the International Master (IM) Eldis Cobo, who also had a well-endowed chess library. Other good friends, the Cuban musicians Evelio and Cecilio Tieles, great fans of the game, translated materials from Russian and French that were not known in Spanish at the time (such as the letters from Alexander Alekhine to Capablanca regarding the matches rematch between them, which was never carried out, as is known). The book was a true editorial success in Cuba at the end of the 80s.
Subsequently, Miguel Ángel settled in the United States and earned a living as a journalist in different media, but he never abandoned his attention to Capablanca. He always thought of enriching the first version of the book published in Cuba, and this investigative obsession allowed him to continue finding data and information over the years that he processed for the second edition, in English, significantly increased and corrected. Jose Raul Capablanca. A chess biographyrun by the American publisher Mac Farland, with a branch highly specialized in chess issues, and which came to light in August 2015.
The friends on the island managed a Cuban edition of the new version, which kept the same title, which became a reality two years later, in 2017, by the Ediciones Unión label. Exactly three decades later, Cuban readers could once again access the vicissitudes of Capablanca’s life.
Of my own authorship, in the prologue of the book (“Capa, Caissa’s favorite son”), I will ponder the tenacious investigation of Miguel Ángel and his tireless search for data on the life of the great player. The new edition was presented in the Uneac gardens, in Havana, where, before a large audience, the author recalled moments of his early connection with chess and the vicissitudes of the book. Once again, Capablanca’s biography was once again an editorial phenomenon in Cuba. The book, both in Spanish and English, has had great critical success.
But chess has been and is for Michelangelo a phenomenon that goes beyond the attractive and imposing figure of Capablanca, with all the enormousness of its dimension. Recently, co-authored with Jesús Suárez, he published an interesting book about the two physical visits —and one virtual— to Cuba by the great American chess player and world champion, Robert Bobby Fischer, then a fearsome teenager in the first one (1956) and, a decade later, became a world-class player in the 1966 Olympiad. Between the two stays, Fischer participated via teletype (not by phone, as sometimes it is said) in the “Capablanca In Memoriam” Tournament of 1965, becoming the sensation of the event. He was already the sensation of world chess.
Bobby Fischer in Cuba, 2019, includes, in addition to the exhaustive stories of the Cuban visits of the genius, all the commented games, 39 in total, and 2 recovered from the 1956 stay, a true detective feat by Sánchez-Suárez. It is a book on chess and on chess from an emblematic figure of the science game, another great contribution of Sánchez to the subject.
With a foreword by two GMs, the Cuban Leinier Domínguez and the American Andy Soltis, the volume rigorously examines Fischer’s “three” visits to Cuba. It is full of data unknown until its publication and is a heartfelt tribute by the two authors to an outstanding chess figure of all time. Someday it will be necessary to do the Cuban edition of the book. It will be a publishing phenomenon.
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Note:
1 Previously, the Cuban GM José Raúl Capablanca, third world champion between 1921 and 1927, GM Guillermo García and the XVII World Chess Olympiad that had its headquarters in Havana in 1966, had been exalted. the FIDE Master (International Chess Federation) Uvencio Blanco Hernández, vice president of the Hall, in the book Chess Hall of Fame in Americarecently published.
