 "Photo: Souphia Ieng")
UTD's Chess Team traveled to Havana, Cuba Oct. 15-20 to compete against the Instituto Superior Latinoamerico de Ajedrez (ISLA) after more than seven months of planning by Vice President for Diversity and Community Engagement Magaly Spector.
"Going to Cuba is very special," Spector said. "This was the first time since Cuba became Communist, after Fidel Castro took over, that a university team traveled there to play chess."
Spector said that there were four main obstacles to the trip: clearance from the US Department of the Treasury, which took two months; approval from the Cuban officials, which took another five months; visas, which were not received until two days before the trip; and funds.
Spector, a native of Cuba, is a notable chess player in her home country, having won the Cuban Chess Championship in 1978 and 1979.
While visiting her family in Cuba three years ago, Spector reconnected with the Cuban chess organizers. When she started working at UTD, they discussed the possibility of a chess match between UTD and one of the Cuban universities.
Spector said that the event was intended to create collaboration between the two countries and open doors for the U.S. to know about Cuba.
"This was not just a chess match. It was a symbolic event between the two countries," Spector said.
The match was held in the Hotel Habana Libre, where the 17th Chess Olympiad was held in 1966. One of the competitors at that Olympiad was American Robert Fischer, a legendary chess player and world champion from 1972 to 1975.
The team was led by Coach Rade Milovanovic and Director James Stallings in two face-to-face rounds against the ISLA players, each lasting four and a half hours, Milovanovic said.
International Master (IM) Puchen Wang, actuarial science sophomore, defeated his opponent with a final score of 1.5-0.5. IM Marko Zivanic, computer science graduate student, fought to a 1.0-1.0 draw. Grandmaster Alejandro Ramirez, arts and technology graduate student, and IM Salvijus Ber?ys, finance junior, both lost with a score of 0.5-1.5. IM Jacek Stopa, international political economy senior, lost with a score of 0.0-2.0. Tautvydas Vedrickas, international political economy junior and alternate, did not play.
Ramirez, Zivanic and Stopa all agreed that ISLA's team had strong opponents.
"This match in Cuba was more similar to the one we played in Beijing. I mean, we were playing really, really strong opponents," Ramirez said. "Basically, they're all chess professionals. We were at a slight disadvantage, being more focused towards academics."
Vedrickas said he thought this trip was even more important than the Beijing trip.
Zivanic said ISLA's team had three players strong enough to be grandmasters.
"I played one of the shittiest tournaments of my life," Stopa said. "I lost in twenty moves with white, which hadn't happened in years."
Zivanic and Ramirez said a certain amount of the games had to be attributed to luck on the winner's part, simply because the games were so close.
"It could have gone either way," Ramirez said.
The match was originally planned to be broadcast online through the Internet Chess Club (ICC), but the limitations of Cuba's Internet connection due to the blockade only allowed the match to be broadcast within the hotel itself.
"The Internet is very slow. There's no way you could do a broadcast with such a connection," Zivanic said. "We could barely check our e-mail."
Spector said that in Cuba, the only Internet connections available are via satellite and most people only have Internet access at work. Currently, the U.S. trade embargo prevents Cuban telecommunications companies from having access to underwater fiber-optic cables.
Ramirez said the players were sequestered in a smaller room, while the majority of the spectators were in a larger room where they could talk freely.
Zivanic and Ramirez estimated the number of spectators to be about a few hundred.
Milovanovic said that the team ran out of pamphlets to give out to spectators, when normally only a handful get taken.
"Overall, they have a very strong chess culture, so for them, being a chess player represents something else," Ramirez said. "I would say that (describing the Cubans as) hospitable is an understatement."
Spector said chess is so popular in Cuba that it is played in the streets, which the team had some time to experience firsthand before coming back to UTD.
Milovanovic said that at least part of the popularity could be attributed to José Raúl Capablanca, Havana native and world champion from 1921 to 1927. Capablanca, the "Human Chess Machine," is widely considered one of the greatest chess players of all time.
"I'd never been to a Latin American country before, so it was very interesting," Zivanic said.
Out of the UTD players in attendance, only Ramirez and Stopa are fluent in Spanish.
"I'd been to Puerto Rico before, but that was very different from Cuba," Stopa said.
Ramirez, a native of Puerto Rico, said that this was his third trip to Cuba and he had positive memories of the country, as he had gotten one of his three grandmaster norms (requirements to obtain the title) there.
Milovanovic said the team visited the house of Ernest Hemingway, American writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, located about 30 minutes away from their hotel.
"It was interesting to see his house," Milovanovic said. "In my ex-country, Yugoslavia, it was mandatory to learn from Hemingway."
Spector said the team also visited colonial Havana and had the opportunity to see a culture show featuring Cuban music, dancers, and singers.
"(The trip) was a very positive experience, and I'm definitely looking forward to coming back to Cuba one day," Stopa said.
Spector said that she expects the next step to be Cuban chess players coming to the US.
"This was the beginning of something very big," Spector said.
The team's next tournament will be online against the University of Belgrade at 1 p.m. Nov. 6 in the Davidson Auditorium.
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