Rafael Blanco

Biography

In 1939, at the Chess Olympiad in Buenos Aires, the Cuban team played with José Raúl Capablanca in its ranks. Rafael Blanco played fourth board, and his score was a hard one: two wins and six losses.

For him this was a late episode. By then he was a well-known Havana caricaturist and a three-time champion of his country.

He was born in Havana on 1 December 1885; some sources also give 1890, and there is no certainty about it. From 1902 to 1905 he studied at the National School of Fine Arts “San Alejandro”. The materials available say nothing about his teachers or his first commissions, and I will not invent them. The first exhibition known to us took place in 1912 at the Ateneo y Círculo in Havana. In 1916 he showed work at the National Salon of Fine Arts, held at the Cuban Academy of Sciences. A year later the magazine Revista La Ilustración awarded him the first, second, third and fourth prizes at once. In 1921 he took part in the First Salon of Humorists in Havana, and the humour salons remained a regular venue for him: in 1952, at the eighteenth of them, he won second prize in the “Personal Caricature” category. Between those dates came the solo exhibition “Satirical Collection” (Colección Satírica) at the Lyceum of Havana (1932), the gold medal of the Ibero-American Exhibition in Seville (1930) and the bronze medal of the 24th Salon of Fine Arts (1942). In 1954 his work was shown at the Second Hispanic-American Biennial of Art at the National Museum of Fine Arts.

Chess ran alongside drawing. In 1913 he played in an international tournament in Havana. He became Cuban champion in 1914, 1920 and 1937. The championship trophy, the Dewar Cup (Copa Dewar), went permanently to whoever won it three times, and Blanco was the only player to manage this. His place on the team at the 1939 Olympiad fell in the final years of his chess career.

He died on 4 August 1955 in Havana, where he had been born. In 1956 the Havana Journalists Association held a posthumous exhibition of his work. In 1980 the National Museum of Fine Arts showed the exhibition “Rafael Blanco and His Gouaches” (Rafael Blanco y sus gouaches), and in 1985, for the centenary of his birth, another: “Rafael Blanco. Homage on the Centenary of His Birth”. Among the works in the museum’s collection, Los zacatecas is mentioned.