“When were you happiest?” asked the magazine New in Chess to the young Norwegian Johan-Sebastian Christiansen. “Maybe on my way to my first Olympiad,” he said. I wondered if the same had been true for me. It’s not an easy question to answer, as happiness is not always caught red-handed the moment it occurs. Max Euwe once said in an interview that when in 1935 he was cheered by a big Amsterdam crowd, because he had just become world champion, he had thought, “Funny, I should be very happy now.”
My first Olympiad was in Havana in 1966. We first flew to Madrid and there we were picked up by a Cuban plane that would bring us to Havana free of charge. I think that at that time Spain was the only West-European country which had landing rights in Cuba.
Our team was without our best Dutch player Hein Donner. He had taken part in several Capablanca Memorial tournaments and he sympathized with Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution, but at home he had become involved in another political struggle.
His wife Irene van de Wetering had become a prominent member of the Dutch anarchist group Provo. Hein had kept his distance from that group, but when Irene, during one of the playful Provo manifestations, had been arrested and briefly been locked up, Hein, in protest against Dutch police brutality, refused to represent the Netherlands. Or that’s the reason he gave for his absence.
In Havana we lived a life of luxury in Hotel Habana Libre, which had been the Hilton before the revolution and temporarily functioned again in full glory. It was close to the Bay of Havana and on a walk to the sea boulevard I saw an exhibition on American imperialism, with a poster of an ape with a cola bottle.
Occasionally we talked about politics. I remember that during a garden party at the Dutch embassy, the chancellor (a now defunct title for the head of financial administration of the embassy) was very much against Castro, because since the revolution, prices had gone up and according to him, white people now had to sometimes take orders from blacks.
Our team captain Harry de Graaff had a better reason to be anti-Castro: the fact that, in 1959, after the take-over, the revolutionary government had organized trials and executions in a sports stadium for the enjoyment of the public.
De Graaff was a pensioned military man with a patriotic attitude. “Don’t forget that you’re playing for your country,” he used to admonish us, to which a common answer was: “Please Mr. De Graaff, let me play for myself and I’ll do much better.”
We started with a qualification tournament in a group of eight countries, the top two of which would go to the final group A. That should have been Hungary, clearly the best team, and the Netherlands, clearly second best. However, Cuba scored surprisingly well and finished a half-point ahead of us.
Two teams from our group, Hungary and Venezuela, confided to our team that they had been approached by a Cuban delegation that had tried to bribe them to shed some points. They had refused, but what had the other four teams done?
So we ended up in final group B, which we would win by a big margin, and the Cubans had managed to reach the prestigious final A where people like Fischer, Petrosian and Spassky were playing, and where they would lose all their matches.
Actually, as a newcomer I wasn’t informed about the deals that had been going on until we were on our way back home. Shouldn’t our team have protested? Frank Goudsmit, the president of the Dutch Chess Federation, said that it would have been pointless, as everything would have been denied by everyone involved, and that the only effect of a protest might have been that the protester might wake up in his hotel room with a rattlesnake in his bed.
I played quite well and remained unbeaten in the Olympiad, but our top scorer was Kick Langeweg, who had the best score on the fourth board with 12 out of 15, ahead of Leonid Stein and Aleksandar Matanovic. But alas, it was in that wretched final group B.
At our departure, all participants were given a big and beautiful chess set, which I sometimes still use to play over a game by Mikhail Tal or Garry Kasparov. All in all, I think that I was very happy in Havana at my first Olympiad.
I met again with my opponent of the game in the viewer much later at the Lost Boys tournament of 1997 in Antwerp, where he was one of the arbiters. I recognized him and he recognized me. I knew that we had played in Havana and that I had won, but I had no idea how the game had gone. But he had a better memory.
“It had been a Ruy Lopez,” he said. “I had been a bit worse all the time and when we adjourned, we had an appointment at the Belgian consulate which could not be cancelled. There was not much time to analyze and the next day I lost quickly.”
He is still a combative chessplayer, I thought. He had lost, more than thirty years earlier, but he still knew that it had been because of an appointment at the consulate. Somehow we stood even. I had won the game, but he had remembered it correctly after all these years, while my memory was a fog.
And when I played over that game recently for this column, with an engine running, I wondered what I had done during adjournment time. Had I really analyzed the position? If so, I had done a bad job. In those days I was blissfully optimistic and I might just have thought that the win would come of itself, which eventually it would.
Click here for Ree-Mollekens, Havana (ol) 1966.