Juan Villoro
Among other wonders, Portugal is the country where fado soothes with sadness, where Pessoa gave voice to more than seventy poets, and where a coup d’état was wonderful.
Ricardo Viel reconstructs this last episode in a fascinating chronicle: La Revolución de los claveles (The Carnation Revolution), recently published in Mexico. On April 25, 1974, a revolt by middle-ranking army officers ended the longest dictatorship in 20th-century Europe.
Censorship and repression were rampant in the country, and compulsory military service forced people to fight in the colonies; the streets were filled with mutilated veterans who had fought in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea. “More than half of households had no running water,” writes Viel. The economic disaster was sustained by authoritarianism: “There were some 30,000 political prisoners and between 7,000 and 10,000 books censored.” The only destinations for free thought were clandestinity or exile.
The military elite benefited from the dictatorship, but the captains forged a rebellion with the most surprising ideology ever to emerge from a barracks: “an end to the colonial war, the end of censorship and the political police, amnesty for political prisoners, the legalization of political parties, and the holding of elections.”
On April 25, several commandos marched through Lisbon with these slogans, and the people joined them enthusiastically. Within hours, the coup turned into a peaceful revolution. Celeste Caeiro, a 40-year-old single mother, played a decisive role in the plot. When she arrived at the restaurant where she worked, she learned that it would be closed due to the unrest. The owner had bought carnations so that they wouldn’t go to waste; he asked his employees to take them home. Celeste was approached on the street by a soldier who wanted a cigarette. She said she didn’t smoke but offered him a flower and placed a carnation in the barrel of his rifle. The symbol of the revolution was born.
The most surprising figure at that moment was 29-year-old Captain Salgueiro Maia, who led his battalion to the Council of Ministers. Without firing a single shot, he secured the government’s surrender and prevented reprisals against the defeated. In his pockets, he carried two objects: a white handkerchief to approach the enemy and a grenade, which he planned to use against himself if he was arrested. The president agreed to surrender, but asked to do so before a general. At that moment, Maia was the most powerful man in the country, but he acted with “military courtesy” and requested the arrival of a superior.
The scene was made possible by another hero who remained anonymous for decades. José Alves Costa, 22, was in command of a tank that could have prevented Maia from reaching the Council of Ministers. He received orders to fire, but refused to do so. Out of a sense of modesty that the Portuguese have perfected, he did not want anyone to know about him and only agreed to be identified 40 years later.
Maia also rejected the vulgarities of fame. “He was impeccable at the decisive moment,” writes Viel, and he did not change with victory: “He did not become a politician or seek the limelight.” He died of cancer at the age of 47 and asked to be buried without honors, “in the cheapest coffin on the market.”
Pessoa says in a poem: “There are only two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between the two, every day is mine.”
Certain people have a third public date. April 25 will be associated with Salgueiro Maia, but also with Joaquim Furtado, a broadcaster at Rádio Clube Português. In the early hours of the 25th, eight officers took over the station to read the insurgents’ communiqué. At 4:26 a.m., they received orders to do so, but they hesitated at the microphone. Furtado read the message of liberation with pleasure. In his interview with Viel, he said ironically, “When I die, the headlines will read: The voice of April 25 dies.”
Symbols define history. April 25 is remembered for the red carnations. Ricardo Viel adds a detail that we cannot overlook. The sites that were to be taken by the rebels had code names, and the radio station was called “Mexico.”It was only logical, after all, that the most contradictory of rebellions—a war without bullets, a coup d’état for peace—should be associated with a country whose greatest natural resource is contradictions.
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