THE COMMUNISTS AND THE PORTUGUESE REVOLUTION
Maxwell, Kenneth
The Portuguese revolution came at an inopportune moment for the superpowers. The height of the crisis in Portugal was sandwiched between the summits at Vladivostok (November 24, 1974) and...
...yet, toward the end of the summer, despite Cunhal's constant criticism of these "verbalists," the PCP entered into a "revolutionary front" with them and was so linked when the November showdown took place...
...The PCP was also strong within the labor movement...
...Third, the economic situation in Portugal became increasingly precarious and this allowed outsiders leverage they had lacked before...
...embassy at this time, Ambassador Frank Carlucci and Deputy Chief of Mission 204 Herbert Okum, were both "old Brazil hands...
...Simultaneously, discipline collapsed, and more quickly among the "leftist" units than among the centrist or rightist units...
...Communist actions were alienating powerful elements of the Portuguese left that had previously collaborated with the Communists in the anti-Fascist struggle...
...All were backward and in many respects isolated rural communities, each in its own way a highly traditional society...
...Agriculture is intensive and diverse...
...The MFA assembly was expanded to 240, representing the three services and incorporating for the first time sergeants and enlisted men in addition to regular officers (sergeants and enlisted men had already participated in organs of the MFA in Africa...
...As a member of the first Provisional Government, Cunhal followed a line of studied moderation...
...But leading officers did little to disguise their contempt for "bourgeois" electoral politics...
...In 1970 this gave rise to a Marxist-Leninist left that regarded the PCP as "revisionist" and either looked back nostalgically to Stalin or turned to Mao for inspiration...
...Now, with the power of the monopolies and latifundiarios destroyed, the editors of Cunhal's 1974 book For a Democratic and 201 National Revolution, when revising the work in July 1975, suggested that "the present historical stage of the revolution seems to be more correctly defined as a superior stage [than the title of Cunhal's book implied], that of socialist revolution...
...The Socialists feared that the proposed centralized union structure would block the major inroads they were making among traditionally Communist workers who were disenchanted with the PCP's ambivalent attitude toward wage claims and labor militancy during the first year of the revolution...
...In 1970 the Communist-influenced unions joined Intersyndical, a coordinating organization...
...In response, the government shifted its recruitment policies, providing free tuition and a salary to cadets and even admitting conscripted officers (milicianos), to bestow status, to the academy...
...Despite the strong socialist orientation in the wording of the constitution, the regime that was instituted in 1976 did not substantially differ from the Western mainstream...
...Western governments over the summer of 1975 made it very clear to Lisbon that economic assistance would be dependent on political good behavior...
...Although some of these had been milicianos, the MFA did not include those younger men in their twenties who were still milicianos...
...The height of the crisis in Portugal was sandwiched between the summits at Vladivostok (November 24, 1974) and at Helsinki (August 1, 1975), and while both East and West meddled in the internal affairs of Portugal, each was restrained by a mutual desire to protect more important bilateral arrangements...
...Events —as with the nationalization of the banks, the land seizures, the take-over of Reptiblica and Lisbon's Catholic radio station —often moved faster under grassroots pressure than the central committee of the PCP might have wished...
...For these the Socialists indeed paid a heavy price in popular support...
...The old oligarchy was destroyed...
...Since the fighting had begun in Angola, there had been a rapid falloff in the number of applicants to the officers' academy and, as a result, a chronic shortage of personnel in the middle ranks...
...Their policies had until that moment been based on defeating the great landowners and the monopolists...
...the Popular Democrats (now called the Social Democrats), 26.4 percent...
...Both occasions were used to weed out and incarcerate purported enemies, including, to be sure, major figures of the old regime and the financial and industrial oligarchy, but also (in March) several military officers who from the beginning had been leading members of the MFA...
...After the incapacitation of Salazar in 1968 and during the early years of Marcello Caetano, Salazar's successor, liberalization of the rules governing election to positions within the corporative syndicate structure allowed Communists to take a leading role in union committees...
...In fact, there were important similarities between the regions of Popular Democratic and Communist strength...
...Consciously imitating the Italian precedent, the PCP hoped to turn Evora, the major city of the Alentejo, into a "Portuguese Bologna...
...this pact assured military supremacy for at least three years, relegated the provisional government to a subordinate position in the new hierarchy of power, and gave to the MFA assembly a coequal voice with any future national assembly in the election of a president...
...Lieutenant Ramiro Correia, a naval officer who had 199 become a leading figure in the general staffs Fifth Division, likened the contest to a "football pool...
...The socialist revolution [he continued] is directed against the bourgeoisie in its totality and for this reason, some of the allies of the proletariat in the first stage (sectors of the urban middle class, sectors of the rural peasantry, and some elements of the petit bourgeoisie) cease to be allies during the socialist revolution...
...The Socialists were the first choice in the more modern, open area of Portugal...
...There was something to this 194 picture —more than middle-aged intellectuals elsewhere in Europe were at first prepared to admit, and less than was hoped by young radicals who saw Portugal as the beginning of a European revolution...
...Their attack on the newspaper Republica became an international cause celebre, and the attempt to monopolize the mass media proved to be entirely counterproductive for the Communists...
...Colonel Vasco Gonsalves, another member of the political committee, had been involved in a putschist attempt a decade earlier, and his actions on that occasion had closely paralleled those of the Communist party...
...in Coimbra, 43.3 percent...
...With a per capita income of just over $1,000, Portugal spent a minimum of $63.27, per capita on military expenditure, and this despite abysmal pay for officers and, after deductions for uniforms, food, and other services, token or nonexistent pay for the troops...
...Once the balance of power had changed after the November 1975 countercoup, it was inevitable that in time many who had supported the Socialists or the military Democratic Socialists in the anti-Communist and antiGoncalvist struggle of 1975 would find their way back to more congenial surroundings...
...The coup d'etat thus brought about real changes, created real victims, challenged real assets...
...In Portugal, as might have been anticipated, this development had a similarly sobering affect on the Portuguese officer corps—even upon the leftists within it...
...What does the behavior of the Portuguese Communist party demonstrate, if anything, about Communist strategies in contemporary Europe...
...The most public move of the revolutionary council was to oblige the political parties to sign a pact with the M FA (April 11, 1975...
...This alliance during the November 25, 1975 showdown delivered the decisive coup de grace to the dream of "socialist revolution" so avidly espoused a few months before by Alvaro Cunhal and his allies...
...The caution of the nonCommunist military leaders and their defensive strategy paid off...
...or Spain...
...And it is at least worth noting that the behavior of the PCP between August and November 1975 provided a very convenient smokescreen that did much to cover the beginning of large-scale Soviet and Cuban intervention in Angola...
...Known at times as the "operationals," this fourth group was composed of officers who reflected the professional interests of the officer corps, which had, of course, been a powerful element in the original captains' movement...
...The PCP also overestimated the tenacity of their friends and underestimated that of their enemies...
...The Communists' union organization expanded its influence...
...It was associated with Otelo de Carvalho and dominated the command structure of COPCON and several of the key regiments in the Lisbon area, especially the light artillery and the military police...
...Socialist preeminence had rested on an enforced and uneasy compromise between two powerful, antagonistic, and regionally defined social and political movements...
...Cunhal had first called for such alliances in 1965...
...Attachment to tradition and family and a strong suspicion of innovation are general...
...The military budget prepresented at least 7 percent of the GNP, more than that of the U.S...
...There are several reasons for this reversal...
...It was an army with almost no totally professional units...
...While small in numbers and fragmented into numerous competing factions, these groups were to exercise considerable influence before and after the coup, especially in student and later in some union and military circles...
...vii After the November 1975 countercoup, the revolutionary moment had passed...
...But the power of the populists was undermined by the indiscipline that populism brought with it...
...The problems that faced the new political leaders were not merely theoretical...
...Very little has yet appeared about this aspect of the Portuguese situation that can be relied on, but there can be little doubt that foreign intelligence operatives from the NATO countries were very active in Portugal between June and November 1975...
...Now, under the supervision of Commander Almada Contreiras, a new intelligence and counterintelligence agency was established and it, too, under Goncalvist control...
...The Socialists had little choice in the face of chronic balance-of-payment deficits and the IMF's insistence that Portugal—if it was to receive the substantial foreign loans needed to prevent the country's bankruptcy—had to implement stringent austerity measures...
...First, the all-important alliance with the military radicals failed...
...If you believe that the Constituent Assembly will be...
...The MFA was especially strong in Guine and Mozambique...
...The first important fact about the Portuguese revolution is so obvious that its significance is often overlooked...
...It is perhaps only accidental that the two leading officials in the U.S...
...For each it was a tactical alliance...
...But, by mid-summer, the initiative within the military had passed to a second group of the left within the MFA...
...Western observers, therefore, tended to see the movement as basically conservative...
...Since the banks also owned or held mortgages on virtually every Portuguese newspaper, the state now also assumed financial control of much of the communications media: all the Lisbon morning dailies, two Oporto morning dailies, three of the four Lisbon evening dailies, and a group of weekly magazines and newspapers...
...With the right and center effectively neutralized, the struggle for power began in earnest within the left and inside the MFA...
...both proved incapable of attracting sufficient parliamentary support...
...The tactical problems facing the PCP leadership in the spring and summer of 1975 were considerable...
...The civilian pickets and barricades had been established with the connivance and support of COPCON (the Operational Command for the Continent, organized July 8, 1974), which functioned as the MFA's own command structure under Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho and circumvented the traditional military hierarchy and the politically "unreliable" elements still ensconced within it...
...Collaboration with the political parties was necessary in their view if an orderly and peaceful transition to socialism was to be achieved...
...The key political element in this reversal had more to do with the internal dynamics of Portuguese politics and society than with any outside interference...
...An important and vocal segment of the Portuguese left, however, opposed all such alliances...
...There were several factors beyond the PCP's control that help explain the Communists' behavior in this critical period...
...Most important, the party was never able to resolve its deep internal divisions over ideology and tactics...
...With the backing of the Communists in March 1975, the MFA assembly imposed a series of far-reaching measures, the most critical of them the nationalization of the banks and insurance companies...
...citizens were organized in neighborhood commissions, unions, and political parties, and could no longer be ignored either by the government or by private capitalists...
...Forced underground since the first days of the Salazar dictatorship, the long decades of clandestine existence profoundly affected the Portuguese Communists' psyche and behavior...
...In the north, the size of the average farm holding is a little over 2 hectares (1 hectare equals 2.47 acres), but landownership is almost universal...
...Few nonagricultural workers in the north, for example, do not also have some access to land, and the factories in the region north of Oporto, up toward Braga, are often small paternalistic enterprises...
...Soares was a poor administrator, and the party functioned more as an employment exchange for choice jobs in the public administration...
...The returns provided inadvertently a geography for counterrevolution, a geography of which the Communists' enemies inside and outside of Portugal were soon to take advantage...
...During the period 1976-78, despite the experiences of '75, the PCP retained a strong hold on its faithful...
...q 206...
...The difficulty with this "new stage" was that it inevitably showed up the ambivalent attitude of the Communists toward their would-be allies, the small and middle-level farmers of the central and northern regions and the small shopkeepers and property owners in the towns...
...Rainfall is abundant and there is access to ancient irrigation systems...
...But in two critical respects they diverged: in religion and land ownership...
...After Fidel Castro, Cunhal was the first Communist leader to approve the 1968 Soviet intervention in Prague, strongly diverging thereafter from his Iberian counterpart Santiago Carrillo in Spain...
...But there can be no doubt now that as early as August 1975 Cunhal was privately urging caution upon the central committee of the PCP...
...The new prime minister, Si Carneiro, has once been referred to as "the Cunhal of the right...
...it had been sustained through times of great adversity by 3,500 small shareholders...
...Blank votes numbered no more than 7.0 percent of the total...
...Since the Portuguese military had long been regarded as among the most retrograde and reactionary in Europe, the political views of the MFA —the Armed Forces Movement (Movimento das Forcas Armadas) were a considerable surprise to most observers, as indeed was the coup itself...
...The old regional antagonism now has been paralleled by a consolidation of antagonism along class lines...
...Moreover, several hundred thousand angry refugees poured into Portugal from Africa throughout the summer...
...In any event, land seizure occurred on a massive scale and with minimal resistance...
...After March the Goncalvists dominated the commission that had been established to dismantle the secret police, a key position because of the access it afforded to the voluminous files...
...The "centrist" position of the Communists had a totally different content from that espoused by General Spinola, the provisional president...
...In the municipal elections, held on December 16, 1979, the Socialist defeat was even greater, and the party lost control of Portugal's two principal cities—Lisbon and Oporto...
...Shortterm Socialist victory, on the other hand, was followed by a longer-term decline...
...On the other hand, the movement to the left in Portugal, which had seemed so categorical in 1975, failed to sustain itself...
...Among the landless laborers, class consciousness is strong...
...Finally, it must be noted that the confused situation in the country allowed for effective action by agents provocateurs...
...it was five times that of the U.K., and three times that of the U.S...
...In one of the highest turnouts ever recorded in a national election (91.7 percent), the Portuguese Socialist party led by Mario Soares took 37.9 percent of the vote...
...A revolution was not at all the intention of those who made the coup d'etat of April 25, 1974...
...The commandos wanted to go in and clear out the crowd...
...The new Communists were also, according to Cunhal's own retrospective criticism, highly sectarian, intolerant, and indiscrete...
...Moreover, on several occasions large-scale violence might have discredited and split the anti-Communist alliance now forming between Socialists, nonCommunist leftists, moderates in the military, and civilian and Church leaders in central and northern Portugal...
...To the left of both Melo Antunes and the PCP-influenced Goncalvists stood a populist radical group with fuzzy ideological views but with some military support...
...Ironically, much of the foreign press, obsessed with the power of the Communists, also dismissed the elections as being of minor significance...
...The most dangerous moment perhaps occurred when large numbers of Alentejan workers besieged the Constituent Assembly and members of the government in the National Assembly Building in Lisbon...
...With a solid core of support in the unions and in the rural south, the party's strategy called for alliances with the owners of small and medium-sized businesses...
...In 1974 out of a population of a little over 8 million, one in four men of military age was in the armed forces...
...The districts of Braganca and Vila Real in the north, along with those of Beja and Evora in the south, suffered the highest rates of infant mortality...
...The most radical units tended to become the most chaotic, and Communist attempts to subvert the more disciplined units, especially the commandos, failed miserably when the tough and popular commando colonel won over his troops in the consequent showdown...
...The lowest Communist turnout occurred in the presidential election of '76, when the Communist candidate received only 365,371 votes and 7.2 percent of the total cast—many Communist sympathizers defecting to the cause of the military populist Otelo de Carvalho who received 796,392 votes and 16.5 percent of the total...
...Mozambique-born Major Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, the leader of the military planning group, was much influenced by the theories of guerrilla struggle in Guine where he had worked in psychological warfare...
...Cunhal was right in believing that the staying power of the far leftist factions was limited...
...2) a segregated elite of staff officers, recruited from the upper classes of Portuguese society, exclusively devoted to administration and relieved of combat duty...
...The dictatorship was toppled by the army, not by the Communists or anyone else...
...The Communiks, as Cunhal recognized later, also "badly evaluated the situation in the armed forces and were overoptimistic as to the outcome • of the internal conflicts within the military...
...And again, civilian vigilantes mobilized...
...And as if to confirm the image of Stalinist high-handedness, Cunhal gave his famous interview to Oriana Fallaci...
...If in 1975 Portugal had looked to some like Czechoslovakia in 1948, by early 1980 it is beginning to look like Italy, a similarity reinforced by the visit of Enrico Berlinguer, secretary-general of the Italian CP, to Lisbon in September 1979, at the beginning of the parliamentary campaign...
...In the coastal plain between the two major cities of Oporto and Lisbon, and up the river valley to Coimbra and Santarem, their support was concentrated in regions with good communications that tended to be at least partly industrialized, Of course, the industrial coastal strip merged into the more clearly defined regions to the north and south...
...Thus the MFA was a small compact group with strong personal interrelationships, numbering less than 200 officers out of a middle-rank corps of some 1,600...
...That in itself was a major point of victory for the civilian political parties and one that the military radicals afterward regretted having conceded...
...The influence of the Church is negligible, often nonexistent...
...Thereafter, President Eanes turned away from the political parties and twice formed governments that were led by technocrats...
...The pact between the MFA and the political parties, as it turned out, was not as one-sided as it originally appeared...
...The intransigence of the Portuguese regime and its commitment to the wars made that inevitable...
...The Portuguese Communist party was founded in 1921...
...Yet, caution and restraint prevailed...
...And the Communists remained as sensitive as ever to criticism (which was not slow in coming) from those Cunhal called "pseudorevolutionary lefists" and "petty-bourgeois radicals...
...COPCON was no more than a coordinating agency and the growth of political passions at unit level tended to undermine its effectiveness, so that the troops under its nominal command dissolved into their component narts...
...During these months the center and the democratic right acted with great skill and restraint, far beyond what the Communists might have expected from the past and continuing high jinks of the now exiled General Spinola...
...The influence of the Catholic Church is strong and religiosity fervent...
...Throughout the spring and summer of 1975, the two major parties of the left came to see each other as principal enemies...
...At base Cunhal's rationale for his alliance had less to do with the social dynamics of Portugal than with the "lessons" of Chile...
...The threat was certainly sufficient to force middle-class Socialists into the streets of Lisbon and Oporto in defense of civil liberties, to mobilize the formidable influence of the Catholic Church, and to drive the peasantry of the northern provinces into violent protest...
...Unlike in the north, where most of those who leave the land do so to go abroad to the factories of France or 200 Germany, in the South migration tends to be internal...
...In the south, on the plains and low plateau of the Alentejo, agriculture is monocultural (cereals, olives), and land ownership highly concentrated (the average size of a farm in the south is almost 40 hectares...
...The political parties, if they were not to jeopardize the Constituent Assembly elections scheduled for April 25, 1975, felt they had no choice but to acquiesce...
...Initially the MFA was composed exclusively of captains and majors of the professional staff...
...In the north, the Popular Democrats and the Social Democratic Center dominated the returns...
...but government by political party proved rocky indeed...
...The Communist parliamentary group acted effectively, and Communist municipal officials proved efficient and honest...
...The restrictions forced upon the political parties during the height of the radical military's influence were undone and a constitutional regime was established...
...hence, strong Alentejan influences extend into the industrial towns of the Lisbon-Settibal area...
...Alvaro Cunhal's Communists a mere 12.5 percent nationwide...
...But the problem was only in part that of a coterie of captains angry about the low rates of promotion and pay, and low esteem...
...By the mid-'70s, this had produced a marked social cleavage within the professional officer corps at the rank of lieutenant colonel, and an extraordinary tangle of jealousy and dissension...
...The political beneficiaries, of course, were the Communists...
...But the Catholic Church, breaking its long political silence, condemned the proposal for a centralized union structure and called for political pluralism...
...For a determined minority within the army, a protest that originated in professional concerns provided a cover for political objectives...
...He was determined to avoid another "Chilean situation," and the emergence of a radical element within the military offered the possibility of forging alliances that might neutralize one of the potential sources of a reactionary comeback...
...The basis of Communist gains and Socialist losses in the December '79 elections indeed was a sharp polarization of Portugal's society...
...Many of the rank and file were to the left of the party leadership, and tensions emerged between "new" and "old" Communists...
...nevertheless, a revolution of sorts was what Portugal experienced...
...These military populists were opposed to all political parties, the PCP included, and so stood for a vaguely defined "people's power...
...The sharpening ideological debate thus reflected a growing struggle to control vital bureaucratic machinery, growing regional polarization, and escalating class and personal antagonisms...
...They misread the balance of forces within Portugal and hence the power of their enemies...
...The elections were of enormous significance, and this was well recognized once the results were in...
...transformed into a parliament, you are very much mistaken," he said...
...Socialists in government did not display great competence...
...and it was edited by a well-known anti-Fascist and Socialist, Raul Rego...
...The Socialists, who had received 37.9 percent of the votes in 1975 and 35.0 percent in 1976, now could muster only 27.6 percent at the end of 1979...
...The West was challenged in regions where its hegemony had been unquestioned for decades, and in consequence the response of Western governments throughout the crisis tended to be defensive...
...and in Santarem, 42.9 percent...
...Finally (though it is difficult to prove it), the Portuguese Communists grossly overestimated the support they could count on from the Soviet Union...
...He is the 196 author of one of the few detailed analyses of the social and economic structures of the Portuguese countryside, A questlio agraria em Portugal —"The Agrarian Question in Portugal" (published in Brazil in 1968...
...Few of these newcomers had received the ideological indoctrination or long experience with party organizations that would have made them a reliable and disciplined force...
...The results of that recent election gave a small parliamentary majority to the Democratic Alliance—a coalition of the Social Democratic party (led by Francisco Sa Carneiro), the CDS (led by Freitas do Amaral), the small Popular Monarchist party, and the "Reformers," a group of former Socialist ministers...
...This reflected an important social phenomenon...
...On September 28, 1974, when the crisis broke, the Communist party had moved efficiently and effectively to organize a blockade of Lisbon, thus preventing the thousands expected for a demonstration in support of General Spinola from assembling...
...Nonetheless, the collapse of the dictatorship in 1974 and Portugal's inability to hold on to its African territories did mean that there were advantages to be gained, especially by the Soviet Union...
...They dominated the office of the Prime Minister 202 and the Fifth Division of the General Staff, the coordinating agency for propaganda and indoctrination that was responsible for the "cultural dynamization" program both within the armed forces and on the civilian level throughout the country...
...The groups of soldiers and armed civilians who conducted the roundups often carried blank arrest warrants issued by 198 COPCON headquarters...
...The second constitutional government, a coalition between the Socialists and the conservative CDS party, fell apart over the issue of land reform...
...At the Communist party's October 1974 congress, the PCP went so far as to drop the phrase "the dictatorship of the proletariat" from their manifesto, the first Western European Communist party to do so...
...The unintended consequence of the elections was to point up the profound differences in social and economic organization between the north and south of Portugal...
...In March 1975, COPCON once again coordinated the defense of the revolution...
...From 1975 to 1980, therefore, the PCP moved from flirtation with the idea of imposing its hegemony upon the nation, in alliance with the MFA, toward an unstated but clear maneuver to establish its hegemony over the left...
...Here was the backbone of the clandestine PCP, and it was from the Alentejo that the PCP, as soon as it emerged as a legal party in 1974, chose its folk heroes and official martyrs...
...when officerless radical soldiers of the paratrooper corps led a "Left" uprising, the anti-Communist alliance under the command of Colonel Eanes was able to crush it decisively on November 25, 1975...
...In the first months after the coup d'etat, the Portuguese Communists placed themselves firmly in the center of the political spectrum...
...Nevertheless, the Communists did well in the municipal elections of December '76, holding their total vote fairly steady in the face of a sharp rise in abstentions (34.9 percent of the electorate abstained in December '76 as opposed to a mere 8.2 percent in April '75...
...At the time of the bank nationalizations, the revolutionary council also made plain that it would soon promulgate a major expropriation, probably of all estates over 500 hectares, a measure that would destroy the base of the great latifundiarios of the south...
...The nationalizations of industry also proceeded with ease, and again the PCP followed up as much as initiated these moves...
...By 1978, the Socialist attempt to go it alone as a minority government, seeking parliamentary support on individual issues from both left and right, had failed...
...He spoke by then from bitter experience, for it was precisely the small landowners who mobilized in August 1975 to burn and sack at least 48 of the party's offices in central and northern Portugal, virtually expelling the party from these regions, and making it clear that it was in their power to cut off Lisbon from the whole north and center of the country if they chose to do so...
...But they were held back by (then) President General Costa Gomes who, despite his own very equivocal behavior during this period, was not prepared to see Portugal plunged into civil war...
...In Portugal the PCP possessed a strong base in the Alentejo, the grain-producing lands south of the Tagus River—a region of great landed estates...
...RepUblica had a long and honorable record of anti-Fascism...
...The movement as a whole, however, consisted of men with divergent political views...
...Later, some trusted senior officers were incorporated or more often kept informed of developments...
...Each district had a high illiteracy rate (over 40 percent...
...This faction, associated with the name of Major Melo Antunes, saw the armed forces as an essential instrument in the revolutionary process, but its members increasingly objected to the vanguard role usurped by the Goncalvists...
...Despite the left's apparently formidable assets in March 1975 —control of the administration, unions, army, the media, and the political initiative— by the end of November 1975 the left was disunited, weakened, on the defensive, with its power broken...
...As far as one can tell, the anti-Communist military in Portugal was scrupulous in keeping a distance between themselves and those who were nostalgic for a return to the old regime...
...The land seizures in the south, and some highly publicized seizures elsewhere in the country, had thoroughly alarmed the peasantry and scared them into mutual collaboration...
...By April 1975, one year after the coup had opened the doors of the dictatorship's jails, there were more political prisoners than there had been on the eve of Caetano's downfall...
...In the December '79 elections the Communists, in a coalition with the MDP, took 19 percent of the votes—improving their position not only in their traditional bastions but also getting 10 percent of the vote in such places as Braga, one of the centers of the antiCommunist movement in 1975...
...Thus the coincidence between the seizure of power by the radical military and their Communist backers in March and the holding of the elections in April, with their victory for moderation, was of very great importance...
...The rapidly moving political situation in Portugal thus caught the PCP in a state of mutation: no longer the sleek clandestine organization it had been but not yet a mass party...
...All had the highest percentage of the work force engaged in agriculture (over 70 percent...
...For the first time since the April coup, there would exist an alternate source of legitimacy...
...The Communists, of course, abandoned their new "allies" when the confrontation occurred in November...
...Dour Moscow-oriented Communists entrenched in unions, the press, and the local administration—positions that they had seized in the confusion following the collapse of the Caetano regime were portrayed as hell-bent on establishing a dictatorship of the left in alliance with radical military officers...
...the great landed estates were expropriated...
...This demarcation, as far as the Communists were concerned, was very clear...
...In most of the Western world, the political struggle was presented as something of a morality play...
...Originally, the Communists had little representation among the working class, which, until the 1930s, was strongly influenced by anarcho-syndicalism...
...The armed forces represented (at a low estimate) a proportion of 30.83 per 1,000 of the population, exceeded only by Israel (40.09) and North and South Vietnam (31.66 and 55.36...
...Dissention within the officer corps was a reflection of a much deeper malaise that grew out of the scale, composition, and organization of the Portuguese armed forces, all of which in turn was a consequence of the seemingly endless military commitment in Africa...
...Most especially and dramatically, the Communists were alienating the rapidly expanding Socialists under the leadership of Mario Soares...
...The PCP always bore the brunt of this repression...
...Whom to blame for the split is much debated, and it may have been inevitable, even desirable...
...massive state intervention in the economy became the norm...
...Communist support was almost exclusively concentrated in the south of the country, especially in the industrial towns along the south bank of the Tagus estuary opposite Lisbon, and in the Alentejo...
...The first constitutional government was formed under the leadership of Mario Soares, whose Socialist party had retained its plurality in the April '76 national elections...
...The alliance with the MFA became a fundamental pillar of Cunhal's strength...
...The would-be victims, however, had a keen sense of their vulnerability...
...From a rump clandestine organization with most of its leadership living abroad, the party had expanded by the summer of 1975 to over 100,000 members...
...Members were spread out in most units...
...Lisbon: EdicOes Avante...
...The PCP was sensitive to criticism from its left flank and fearful of being out-maneuvered by the leftists...
...To them it meant primarily the defense of the cooperative and collective farms that had replaced the latifundia expropriated in the South...
...The nationalizations and the expropriations of the latifundiarios struck at the two principal bases of the old regime and placed Portugal immediately among the most radical of European states, few of which dared touch the banks or engage in large-scale land expropriation without a clear commitment to compensation...
...Cunhal, Radicalismo Pequeno Burgès da Facada Socialista...
...At the same time, the military radicals pushed forward a major restructuring of the military establishment itself...
...In Lisbon they won 46.1 percent of the vote...
...If the Communists tended to disparage the Socialists and Social Democrats, they took much more seriously the challenge to their predominance from several ultraleftist groups that emerged in the early 1970s...
...The critical point was that the elections scheduled for April 1975, the first anniversary of the coup, would in fact be held...
...The bitter antagonism of the junior officers in the field toward their superiors was 195 aggravated by class friction...
...It is that no mass movement brought the old regime down and that the participation of the clandestine political parties of the left was negligible...
...This weakened and isolated the forces for radical change, and allowed the forces of moderation (or reaction, depending on one's point of view) to recuperate and consolidate power...
...But in January 1975, when the Communists took to the streets in massive demonstrations to support union legislation that would effectively perpetuate their bureaucratic control over the organized working class, the split between the two movements became visible to all...
...No damage that Reptiblica could have done to the Communists had it been allowed to continue could have matched the damage done to the Communists by this manner of its suppression...
...In June '76 General Ramalho Eanes, the military mastermind of the November 25 coup, was elected president of the Republic by an overwhelming majority...
...The Socialists and Popular Democrats (now called the Social Democrats) in the cabinet succeeded in amending the details of the legislation in such a manner as to guarantee free elections for local union officials and committees...
...Its private soldiers were for the most part illiterate, badly trained, and at times tenuously disciplined...
...The officer corps was composed of (1) an aged group of generals...
...Indeed, the owners of small and medium property proved much more formidable opponents than the great landowners and industrialists had been...
...This prevented effective action by the Socialists' government and helped strip them of support...
...When Mario Soares returned from Paris and Alvaro Cunhal from Prague in April 1974, they posed together smiling, holding between them a red carnation...
...Now Admiral Rosa Coutinho, former high commissioner in Angola and in 1975 the executive officer of the Revolutionary Council, attempted to persuade people to cast blank ballots...
...Melo Antunes, a Gramscian Marxist, was the main political figure in this group, but it was a broad group that had important operational support in the central and southern military regions, where the two commanders Colonel Pezerant and Colonel Charais, both early members of the MFA, were close to Antunes...
...Since the Twentieth Congress of the Communist party of the Soviet Union in 1956, the debates and divergences within the international Communist movement had been reflected in Portugal...
...Yet, in truth the situation was much more complicated, especially in regard to the role of the Portuguese Communist party and of the armed forces...
...In the April '76 National Assembly elections, the party gained 14.6 percent of the vote...
...The public dispute between the Communists and the Socialists that developed in January had been in the works for some time, and it paralleled, and to some extent intersected with, major divergences within the military...
...The role of the Portuguese military, and of its many factions, was the central and unique element in the Portuguese situation...
...The election returns demonstrated graphically that the base of support for the revolution was narrow indeed...
...Here the party was strongly implanted among the anticlerical, landless rural laborers...
...But by mid-1975 both of these "enemies" had been put to flight...
...They did face a new situation after March, one that to every appearance had "revolutionary potential...
...They believed that a broader base of social support than that provided by the PCP was essential if the MFA was not to be placed in opposition to the majority of the population...
...Because of the close interlocking of the Portuguese oligarchy and its control of major sectors of the economy, the nationalization of the banks gave the state control of the major part of privately owned industry...
...In fact it was a fourth group in the army, little noticed at the time, that was most active behind the scenes as the summer drew to a close...
...Second, the noisy factions of the far left were in a high state of mobilization during these months, constantly demonstrating in 203 the streets, and making converts among workers and in the military...
...But after 1941, under the leadership of Alvaro Cunhal, the party began to develop a political base...
...in Oporto, 42.5 percent...
...The party was particularly sensitive to developments in Prague, because its activities had been directed from Czechoslovakia since the 1940s...
...Their coalescence was the result less of any uniform conspiratorial objective than of a convergence of resentments, loss of a sense of purpose, and emotional and intellectual estrangement resulting from the long colonial wars...
...Major Melo Antunes, an artillery officer with a long record of opposition to the regime, who had at first dismissed the captains' protest movement as being "a reactionary cooperative in defense of privilege," was to play a key role in drawing up the MFA program...
...Iv But as alliances were being forged on one front, alliances were disintegrating on another...
...The M FA was known to have originated in response to professional grievances and concerns with status and privilege...
...Yet, because the compromise reached by the end of 1975 represented a truce more than a resolution of the conflict, the Socialists' governments as well as the later governments that were led by technocrats found it difficult to implement measures that threatened the unspoken demarcation upon which social peace was based...
...The failure of the left to consolidate a broad base of support for the transformation of Portuguese society was caused preeminently by the bitter split that developed between the Socialists and Communists...
...The Socialists had taken the lead in the antiCommunist counteroffensive in the summer of 1975...
...The President then was forced to install a caretaker government and to call elections for December 2, 1979...
...They all were wrong...
...The attack and take-over of the Catholic Church's radio station in Lisbon also had major negative repercussions, especially among the highly religious peasantry of the north...
...Cunhal himself was to note a year later that there had been "without doubt deficiencies and errors" in the party's activities over these months, preeminently in "underestimating the importance of these classes...
...And these two were the fundamental issues in the struggle that was about to begin...
...The Communists used the period of Socialist preeminence to purge opportunists and establish a strong organization...
...The sudden emergence (and just as sudden disappearance) of a "revolutionary" movement (SUV) within the military ranks in this period, for instance, is remarkably similar in its tone and impact to the sergeants' "movement" in Brazil in 1964, which helped precipitate the coup of that year by conservative generals and politicians...
...In the Alentejo some 1.2 million hectares had been expropriated, often through the initiative of the workers themselves, and sometimes by default, as workers carried on in the place of absentee owners...
...The Communists' minister of labor resisted workers' demands and ensured that the minimum wage was as low as possible...
...The MFA leadership split into various factions, all ostensibly "on the left" but each with a different view of tactics and objectives...
...What united them was the fact that they shared enemies, not that they agreed in principle on the same objectives...
...As early as September 1974, therefore, and most especially after March 1975, it was clear that whatever the army may have wished or the leaders of the MFA may have intended, the intrusion of political and party divisions into the military was unavoidable...
...The election returns also revealed a marked regional polarization...
...Second, the decolonization process that had helped cement the MFA's internal solidarity became, after March 1975, a major irritant and divider as the situation in Angola proved increasingly intractible and as outsiders intervened there at will...
...Communist cooperatives and collective farms absorbed many unemployed rural workers...
...My translation.] Cunhal indeed was blunt...
...The Socialists (PS) emerged as a national party, with respectable percentages in both north and south...
...The behavior of the Communists was sufficiently ambivalent to alienate both the radical left and the democratic Socialists, forcing the former into a futile putsch in November 1975, and the latter into a de facto alliance with a reemergent right...
...It is impossible to speak here with certainty...
...Second Edition, 1974, p. 82...
...But, like most things in Portugal during those cyclone months, appearances were deceptive...
...The groups associated with Prime Minister Colonel Vasco Gonsalves became increasingly isolated as the summer wore on...
...In early 1974 there were probably not more than 2,000 members of the party inside Portugal (130 cells according to one account), and it is not clear how much of the clandestine organization emerged at that time...
...Indeed, Cunhal had already made it clear that the allies of the proletariat for the socialist revolution are not the same as those for the democratic and national revolution...
...workers' pay and power increased dramatically...
...A large percentage of the labor force is composed of farm workers, most in precarious seasonal employment...
...the PCP's sister party, the Portuguese Democratic Movement (MDP/ CDS), a mere 4.1 percent...
...3) a diminished cohort of junior and middle-rank officers, men in their thirties and early forties, who had spent most of their professional lives overseas...
...It was in the central regions of the country and the major urban centers that the Socialists did best of all...
...Coutinho hoped that, should such appeals be successful, the result might be used as an argument to support a political role for the MFA that would allow it to dispense with civilian political parties altogether...
...The beginning of the Portuguese crisis was deceptive in many ways...
...it meant nationalizations, and it meant the constitution of 1976...
...There was, however, a rapid expansion following legalization, and by 1976 the PCP claimed a membership of over 100,000...
...Short-term Communist defeat, therefore, gave way to a longer-term consolidation of Communist strength at the grass roots...
...The radicals should have recognized that, whatever the result of the poll, it was bound to represent a potential challenge' to military supremacy...
...In the civilian sphere the Socialists showed a much greater capacity to mobilize, even to take to the streets, than the Communists had anticipated, and Mario Soares was tougher than even his friends expected...
...the right-wing Social Democratic Center (CDS), 7.6 percent...
...What in fact did happen in Portugal during these confusing years, and why...
...Then Berlinguer warmly embraced Cunhal, whom four years earlier he had condemned for what the Italian Communists then saw as the PCP's "Third World adventurism...
...VI Over the next eight months the fate of the revolution was settled...
...The sergeants and enlisted men were in the minority, but the principle of representation was extended to the three service assemblies and to the committees that emerged at unit levels in barracks throughout the country...
...the strategy gained added significance after 1973 when the mobilization of these same small social groups against the Popular Unity government of President Salvador Allende in Chile proved a critical element in his downfall...
...The phrase was resented by both political leaders, though its virtue is to demonstrate how fragile Portugal's democracy remains...
...Despite conventional wisdom, the work of the young officers had to be liberalizing and liberating...
...The heavy losers of the '79 parliamentary elections were the Socialists and Mario Soares...
...but the commitment of many of their supporters to the party's principles was tenuous at best...
...The PCP, however, has never hidden its belief that the Soviet Union is the "sun," to use Cunhal's word, of the Communist movement...
...Thus the PCP positioned itself very successfully as the defender of "the conquests of the revolution...
...But popular mobilization followed the coup, it did not cause it...
...Prior to the coup the Communists were strongly entrenched in the metallurgical unions and increasingly influential among lower-middleclass white-collar workers, especially the bank workers' unions in Lisbon and Oporto...
...While the Communists enjoyed the luxury of opposition in the years '76-79, the Socialist governments were obliged to take stringent economic measures, causing a deterioration of workers' purchasing power that was without parallel in recent economic history, 205 except perhaps in Chile under Pinochet...
...In any event, it was the isolation of the PCP in the northern and central countryside, together with the isolation of the Goncalvists within the military, that facilitated the formation of a temporary alliance among the anti-Communist forces after August 1975...
...The coup of April 25, 1974 was carried out by a small group of junior officers, all of them influenced by their extensive experience in the colonial wars, most of them believing that the military should play a major role in the political process...
...In 1979 the party claimed 164,000 militants...
...The climate is Mediterranean, with long, hot, dry summers...
...The young officers were after all the epitome of the "petty-bourgeois radicals," the group that Cunhal had spent so much of his time denouncing, and the Communists were 197 appreciated more for their apparent willingness to follow the MFA's leadership and for their discipline and reliability than for their long-term vision of the future of Portuguese society...
...The showdown that pushed Spinola out of the presidency had highlighted the power that the PCP and the MFA could exercise when acting together...
...They misunderstood the psychological impact of some of their actions, throwing some of their potential allies into the arms of their opponents...
...By 1978 the PCP claimed 145,512 members, 58.6 percent of them workers in industry and agriculture-35 percent less than 30 years old, 47 percent between 30 and 50 years old...
...The Army alone contained at least 170,000 men, of which 135,000 were in Africa...
...The demands that "internationalist" solidarity placed on the Portuguese Communists may explain this misalliance...
...A leading figure in this group was Colonel Ramalho Eanes, the future president of Portugal...
...After December 1, 1973, the organization was cemented together at the center by a 15-man coordinating committee that was subdivided into a military committee, charged with the detailed planning of the uprising, and a political committee, which formulated the program for the post-coup situation...
...Close to the PCP, the Goncalvists had established formidable bases of power...
...The Alentejo is a region with a long history of Communist militancy, and Cunhal knows it well...
...Fourth, and perhaps most significant, the Communists made several major blunders...
...The Socialists, in fact, were much less scrupulous than were the Democratic Socialists within the military about accepting rightist support...
...The MFA politburo, then known as the Committee of Twenty, publicly endorsed the Communists' position...
...The multitudes that assembled in the streets of Lisbon and Oporto in the hours and weeks that followed the coup made the army's action irreversible...
...The polarization, so apparent in 1975, continued...
...In Portugal there will be no parliament...
...In the first the proletariat carries out the fundamental attack on the monopolies and latifundiarios allied with the part of the bourgeoisie (the petty bourgeoisie and parts of the middle class) interested in the antimonopolistic fight...
...As the fundamental divergences between Spinola and the PCP over the direction of domestic and colonial policy became more apparent, it brought into closer collaboration the PCP and those members of the M FA who were also opposed to Spinola's attitudes toward decolonization...
...A timetable for Constituent Assembly elections and national parliamentary elections had been an integral part of the original MFA program, and to abandon them would have been an affront to the Portuguese people, who after 50 years of manipulated electoral contests and a narrow franchise were eager to participate...
...The Ministry of "Social Communication," like the Labor Ministry, also was run by military men close to the PCP...
...The Air Force had 16,000, the Navy 18,000, the units of the Republican Guard (GNR) 10,000, and the paramilitary security police (PS P) 15,000...
...This tactic was based on opinion polls commissioned by the MFA that showed as much as 50 percent of the electorate undecided on whom they would support...
...The psychological errors committed by the Communists only hastened this polarization...
...Cunhal himself spent 13 years behind bars in Portugal, and another 14 years in exile in Eastern Europe and Moscow...
...In the constituent election after the coup, the PCP received its largest shares of the vote in the Alentejan districts of Beja, Evora, and Settibal: 39.0 percent, 37.1 percent, and 37.8 percent respectively...
...Yet, in October he led the PCP into its reckless front with the previously despised far left factionalists, an action that further alienated many Portuguese and helped consolidate a very broad-based coalition of forces against the Communists...
Vol. 27 • April 1980 • No. 2
