D.C. chess players are happy to meet their match in Cuba
By John Kelly, Tuesday, May 24, 5:38 PM
Washington’s famed Cosmos Club (incorporated 1878) counts among its members some of the city’s greatest minds. I don’t go there much anymore (my late father-in-law was a member), but I remember there was one wall devoted to members who had won Nobel or Pulitzer prizes and another devoted to members who appeared on postage stamps. That’s the sort of achievement we’re talking about.
So you might expect that when eight members of the Cosmos Club chess team went to Cuba the week before last to take on chess players from that country, those godless Communists would have fallen to our superbrains like bricks from the Berlin Wall.
Well?
“I won’t tell you how we came out,” said Bob Lubic, 82, the retired law professor and Cosmos Club member who arranged the trip.
Oh, come on, Bob, you gotta.
“We got one draw and lost seven.”
Ouch. Checkmate.
But Bob is not at all sad about the drubbing the Cosmos Club chess team received in Havana. He’s just happy they got to play at all.
“If I had known what I would have to go through, I never would have gone through with it,” he said.
Because of the 50-year-old embargo, Cuba is off-limits to Americans, or, rather, Americans aren’t allowed to spend money there. It took Bob two years to arrange the trip, working with various agencies here and in Cuba. Both sides threw up obstacles — bureaucrats can be the same regardless of national origin — but he persevered.
“I’d been a law professor and run law programs in the Soviet Union and Poland,” he said. “I knew because of the limited recreation how important chess was behind the Iron Curtain.”
He figured the Cubans would welcome a U.S. chess team. Even better, their visit coincided with the Capablanca Memorial Tournament, a big international chess fest named in honor of Jose Raul Capablanca, the renowned Cuban player who was world champion from 1921 to 1927.
More here.
I thought it’s not allowed.