Why the Portuguese Don't Smile

...The press, he added, was largely responsible for this situation...

...This was Caetano's authorized answer, as translated by the Portuguese Information Office, and the reader may guess for himself what it means...

...Financial austerity has not raised the Portuguese standard of living...

...Having made his pile, he had returned to his native city, married off his daughters, and now could find nothing better to do than fish the surf off the beach of a fashionable resort...

...This conclusion is strengthened by his unwillingness to discuss, either on or off the record, the possibility that the Salazar dictatorship might evolve peacefully into a democratic regime in which workers could organize and strike, newspapers print what they please, and political parties freely organize, nominate and elect...

...To relieve the pressure on Portugal's meager natural resources and relatively undeveloped industry, the Salazar regime, like its predecessors, has relied on the safety valve of emigration...

...The Goans and other Portuguese colonials objected strongly to provisions in the 1933 act which seemed to impair Portugal's long tradition of racial equality...

...But the rewards, if any, of this Spartan policy must be looked for in the future...

...It is these right-wing intellectuals— those of the Left are still either in exile or in the censored and impotent Opposition—who compose the face of the "Lusitanian Corporative State" as it is presented to the outside world...

...Instead, the evil grows and the procession of victims lengthens, until now one sees whole groups of people begging passing tourists for bread...

...But many of them will also be tempted to ask questions the regime would rather not answer, such as: Why don't they smile, these peasants one passes on the road, the men on bicycles, the barefoot women trudging to the fields with basket on head and broad hoe on shoulder...

...Thirty years of poverty and, unrelenting dictatorship have infected the national spirit Why the Portuguese Don't Smile By James Rorty Since the spring of 1956, when the voice of Portugal was first heard in the United Nations General Assembly, it has become increasingly apparent that the West has acquired a valuable ally...

...Unquestionably, there have been some substantial successes...

...As a member of the Salazar Cabinet, he has advocated relaxation of press censorship...

...indeed, the beneficiaries of Salazar's paternal solicitude seemed to me as grim as Franco's subjects across the border...

...America is the greatest country in the world...

...They are not gay now...

...The March 1957 issue of Portugal, monthly English-language publication of the Portuguese Information Service, shows that Portugal has doubled its production of rice since 1934 and more than doubled the price paid to farmers, while holding the price paid by consumers to somewhat less than twice the 1934 figure...

...There, vineyards stretching to the horizon would seem to invite tractor cultivation and airplane dusting...

...Instead of welcoming the demonstrators who marched into Goa and Diu at the more or less open instigation In recent years, Portugal's Premier Salazar ha9 sought to accentuate the "benevolent" aspects of his regime and deny that it is totalitarian...

...Foreign observers, including a New York Times correspondent, have reported that the Goans are more prosperous than their Indian neighbors and that in the event of a plebiscite they would overwhelmingly reject integration with India...

...In Angola, Mozambique, Guinea, Timor, St...

...At Portinho da Arri-bida, an extraordinarily beautiful resort town 40 miles south of Lisbon, the archaism of the Portuguese fishing industry is even more apparent...

...In 1954, the only newspaper that printed the famous pastoral letter of the Archbishop of Beja, in the fertile agricultural province of Baixo Alentejo, was Catolica, and this only because the censor had not thought it necessary to read the proof sheets of that normally cooperative journal...

...One would have liked to hear Sala-zar's answer to this censored plea...

...Theoretically, under Portugal's present constitution, both areas enjoy the same political status...

...Thome and Principe has a population of over 200,000...

...Salazar, after referring proudly to his record of "a quarter-century of well-balanced budgets and credit balances," acknowledged that Portugal's growing population made necessary "the rapid expansion of the national economy and, where recessary, the intervention of the stale to increase agricultural production...

...The question I was most anxious to have answered was this: Does the present government of Portugal provide non-violent means whereby it could be superseded by another government, either monarchist or republican...

...Nor does one find documents like the pastoral letter of the Archbishop of Beja, or even the occasionally disturbing reports of Government bureaus and commissions which provide much of the grist for Opposition leader Antonio Sergio's privately distributed Antologia Sociologica...

...It is a staggering indictment, by a leading Catholic prelate, of the failure of the corporative state to relieve the distress of the country's preponderantly agricultural population...

...The Republic, between 1910 and 1926, not only balanced its budgets but established two new universities and more secondary schools than during the entire 30 years of the Salazar regime— this despite Portugal's costly participation in World War I, which cost her billions of escudos and 100,000 of her people...

...But what about the face that Portuguese corporatism shows to its own people—and sometimes, more or less inadvertently, to the tourist...

...In his speech on that occasion, Dr...

...Irish farmers are poor, and most of them would emigrate if they could, but they smile nevertheless...

...The production of corn, too, has been substantially increased, and corporative control of the milling and baking industries has benefited marginal consumers by providing a nutritious bread, made of wheat, rye...

...The Information Office assured me that newspaper censorship had been considerably relaxed in recent years and that Portugal today enjoys more actual freedom than during the period of political chaos preceding the Salazar regime, when partisan mobs often sacked and burned the offices of opposition newspapers...

...I see adults so weak from starvation that they can neither stand nor walk...

...66...

...This is not the first year that I have seen people so weakened by hunger that they have fallen in the street...

...He added: "Not necessarily violent means are all those juridical means which governments use to bring about their politics...

...Twice a week, a Portuguese fishing boat, gaily painted and beaked like a Viking galley...

...While war-ravaged Italy, for example, has increased her gross national product at the annual rate of 12 per cent, Portugal's average increase has been less than 5 per cent...

...instead, I obtained an interview with Professor Marcello Cae-tano, Minister of the Presidency, who is generally regarded as Salazar's most probable successor...

...They constituted a restrained plea that next fall's scheduled national election be conducted a bit more fairly than the last one, when opposition candidates were allegedly counted out by official manipulation of election returns in the provinces...

...They are a handsome people, the Portuguese, handsome and strong and capable...

...This economic and political weakness prevented the heavy capital investment that enabled some British colonial administrators, despite their relative illiberality in race relations, to push their native subjects rapidly along the road to civilization and independence...

...This Portuguese racial attitude goes back to the days of discovery and colonization in the 15th and 16th centuries...

...There was no way of knowing, since I could not speak Portuguese, nor would the censored press have been enlightening...

...Thome and Principe, the majority of the inhabitants retain their tribal organization and culture...

...Instead, Caetano reminded me that, prior to Salazar's installation by the Army, Portugal had had, between 1908 and 1926, two kings and eight presidents, of whom two were murdered and five deposed by revolution, and 44 cabinets...

...There was nothing horrifying to them in the idea of the formation of unions, whether in marriage or outside it, with native women, and such unions were not formed surreptitiously and shamefacedly...

...At Nazare, the larger fishing boats are hauled up the beach by ox teams, helped by a couple of recently acquired tractors...

...He is a handsome...

...But one looks in vain in Lisbon newspapers for news of strikes —not only Portuguese strikes, which are prohibited, but those in other countries...

...The fact is that most of the revolutions prior to 1920 were made by the Army and the reactionaries, frequently with the aid of Spanish monarchists from across the border...

...When I interviewed Caetano, he had difficulty in hearing this question...

...The number who have achieved this advancement varies widely...

...At the ancient fishing village of Nazare, a dark-skinned population, reputedly stemming from an early Phoenician settlement, exhibits its picturesque poverty to the tourist...

...The censored passages, amounting to a half-dozen columns of type, had nothing to do with defense or foreign affairs...

...How hungry were they...

...Being without employment for much of the year, [the people in my diocese] are sometimes practically starving...

...A free-lance writer, he has contributed to numerous publications, including Reader's Digest, Harper's and Commonweal...

...We found ourselves beset by bands of begging children, who pursued us even to the outskirts of the-admirable but obviously inadequate Government housing development, which shone like a brilliant patch amid the gray hovels surrounding it...

...Even in the vast feudal demesnes of the Ribatejo in the South, things are little better...

...I am unable to guess whether any other government would have imagination to do more, or not enough to achieve as much...

...Others are silenced by fear of the political police, which pressures employers to fire those who express liberal views and can always exile to the colonies those trade-unionists who question the awards of the corporative tribunals...

...In his youth, Caetano was an enthusiastic admirer of Mussolini's black-shirts...

...Thus the annual "surplus of lives," as the official statistics put it, rose from 49,000 in 1941 to over 110,000 in 1955...

...Meanwhile, the armed services, which alone keep ihe dictator in power, get nearly half of the annual budget...

...Only a qualified answer is possible...

...In the Far East, Portugal still retains half of the island of Timor with nearly half a million people, and her precarious outposts of Macao in South China and Goa, Damao and Diu in India, with another 800,000...

...Emptied, it yields a catch of less than a hundred pounds of sardines, needle fish and squid...

...I don't know who you are, but I gotta talk—I so happy to see an American...

...Has the six-year plan transformed the grim picture painted by the Archbishop...

...Portugal is a Catholic country...

...Even after I had identified myself as an American tourist, he was cautious...

...What is the balance sheet for Salazar's long rule...

...This government no care for the poor people...

...Subsequently, when I presented it in writing, he professed himself unable to understand it...

...Yet, he was not in the least reconciled to current censorship, nor was the director of one of the leading opposition papers...

...Her African possessions include Angola with a population of nearly 4 million, Mozambique with over 5 million, Guinea with 350,000, and the Cape Verde archipelago, which with St...

...The limitations which the Salazar regime places on Portuguese freedom are defined in various statutes and decrees, whose administration may be relaxed or tightened at the will of the dictatorship...

...That an opposition leader like Sergio is for the moment out of jail means little...

...Those people got nothing to fish with, so they got nothing to eat...

...None of them applauded...

...On whatever issue, the spokesmen for Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's "dictatorship of professors"—meaning chiefly law professors—can be counted upon to wield a skilful polemic rapier...

...Brazil today affords an example of such fusion of races and of the stability which can result from it when it is not counteracted by other factors...

...none of them smiled...

...Man, as Dr...

...As for the treatment of native workers, "in some ways the situation is worse than simple slavery...

...vigorous man in his early fifties who has been associated with the Salazar regime since 1929, when, at the age of 23, he was appointed legal adviser to the Ministry of Finance...

...Even the most enlightened prison administrators have never found a way to make their wards smile and like it...

...I "VIE Portuguese as a whole," I said Salazar in 1949, "have never been so free as under the present regime, because, within the limits in which it is granted, liberty is the same for all and is effectively guaranteed...

...And then there is the little matter of freedom...

...Nevertheless, the standard of living remains low, even by official admission, and in general does not seem lo have improved during the thirty years of the Salazar administration...

...The rich, who pay no income tax, have gotten richer, while the poor, whose present tax load is nearly ten limes what it was under the Republic, have gotten poorer and grimmer...

...There both the cattle and the people had seemed poorer, more morose—and hungrier...

...Elections will remain a farce so long as the Government censors the list of opposition candidates and controls the election booths...

...The alleged fact that no native Goan can now become an officer in the Portuguese armed services has been heavily exploited by Nehru...

...Thus, the population of the Overseas Provinces—some 20 million—is roughly equal to that of metropolitan Portugal...

...The result is that Portugal's economic progress has lagged behind that of virtually every other European conn-try west of the Iron Curtain...

...Again, the official physiognomy is cordial and intelligent, as is that of the man in the street or the peasant in the field...

...Furthermore, Salazar's was not the first government to stabilize Portugal's finances...

...Unfortunately, after talking at some length Caetano had second thoughts and restricted quotation to his subsequent written answers to mv prepared questions...

...To this he answered: "An outstanding personality like Dr...

...In dealing with native populations, says this study, the Portuguese "have had an attitude which in itself sufficed to prevent the formation and accumulation of the problems which have in the long run produced so much turmoil in other colonial territories...

...one of them spat, and he was not a Communist...

...A windlass operated by a mule and three men would have been far less picturesque, but it would have done the j ob in half the time...

...It was dark, and the beach was almost completely deserted...

...sweeps around the point with ten men at the oars and drives up the beach through the surf-Disembarking, some twenty fishermen...

...But the dictator is rarely accessible to the press...

...I got to be careful," he explained, after looking up and down the beach and scouting behind a nearby dune...

...In recent years, increasing numbers of Americans have seen this face...

...In an unpublished report dated January 22, 1947, Galvao, who is still in jail, declared that health services in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea were virtually non-existent...

...Even inside the Salazar administration, the 1933 act aroused bitter opposition, culminating in the arrest and imprisonment of Inspector of Colonies Henrique Galvao...

...Salazar, who is responsible for the government of his country for 30 years, greatly influences the state of affairs of his own regime...

...He took the guns away from the not-too-reliable striplings who guard the national headquarters of the movement...

...Emigration to the overseas territories and industrialization have not corrected Portugal's heavily adverse balance of trade or provided jobs for her annual increment of 100,000 "surplus lives...

...I declare that this government cares more for the dead stones of its monuments than for the living people whom it rules...

...I am convinced, however, that his message will be respected even after his death, and that there will be continuity of the regime to which he lent the strength of his genius...

...All this would have been more impressive if the historical evidence did not show that Caetano's description of Portugal's past is almost as biased and selective as his idealization of the present dictatorship...

...Its birth rate remains high—23.94 in 1955 as against 23.76 in 1941—while the death rate has dropped from 17.39 to 11.35 since 1941...

...Even today, few Portuguese, and almost no one outside the country, have had a chance to read this document...

...In Macao, Goa and the Cape Verde Islands, there are only citizens...

...Of this number, 62 per cent went to Brazil, despite the efforts of the Portuguese Overseas Agency to foster emigration to the colonies, or Overseas Provinces as they are now called...

...the native is not bought but hired from the state, although called a free man...

...An informed and objective appraisal of the Portuguese Empire appears in the April 1954 issue of the British Survey, published by the British Society for International Understanding...

...In short, Caetano has only praise for the Caesar whom he may one day bury, and no wish at all to change the character of the government that he may one day head...

...thedrals and monasteries, the luxury of her first-class hotels, the surprising comfort of her modestly priced, well-managed inns, the excellence of her cuisine, and the fascinating variety of her wines...

...I tried out this quotation on about a score of Portuguese citizens of all classes...

...Both send representatives to the National Assembly in Lisbon, and Negro, Indian and Malayan natives of the Overseas Provinces receive voting rights when and if they advance from the legal status of "aborigines" to that of "citizens...

...That was where I met him...

...Salazar is so frequently moved to remind us, does not live by bread alone...

...The rapid shrinkage of British, French and Dutch colonial possessions since World War II has left Portugal the third largest colonial empire in the world...

...Instead, one sees an army of peasants attacking the weed-infested vines with broad hoes and an auxiliary army of women marching into-the fields with shoulder-borne spray tanks...

...Less eminent oppositionists are either in jail or in exile...

...of the Indian Government, the Goans chased their "liberators" back across the border...

...A survey of a northern farm community revealed the incredible poverty of the typical peasant home, which boasts one door and one window, one or two earthenware cooking utensils, and the right to the occasional use of a single hammer shared in common by twenty villagers...

...its weakness, which was particularly apparent during the 19th century, stemmed chiefly from the chronic bankruptcy of the mother country under the long succession of unstable regimes that preceded Salazar's...

...It is unquestionable that the state of psychological hostility between black and white which is so great a potential danger in other parts of Africa has never existed in the Portuguese territories...

...Yet, today the collective face of Portugal is not a happy one, nor is it the face of a nation at peace with itself...

...One editor to whom I spoke, a Catholic monarchist, had himself had such an experience...

...This year, an estimated 40,000-odd Baedeker-thumbing tourists will experience the authentic antiquity and beauty of Portugal's castles, caJames Rorty has just returned from a summer in Portugal...

...The strength of the Portuguese colonial system has been its centuries-old tradition of racial tolerance...

...Partisans of liberalism have every right to see in Portuguese corporativism a deadly enemy...

...The Portuguese have never considered the native races subject to them as inferior to themselves...

...True, the dictatorship has balanced its budget and stabilized the escudo in a period when Italy, France, Spain, Holland and other Western European countries have all undergone varying degrees of inflation...

...I had been assured that Caetano was the most liberal of the younger politicians surrounding Salazar and that he was noted for his frank answers to questions since he was a former journalist...

...Somewhat more revealing was his reply to my next question: whether the present regime would survive the death of so extraordinary a personality as Salazar...

...I see children who get thinner and weaker every day...

...You been to Nazare...

...barley and corn and costing half as much as the standard 80-per-cent-extraction wheat loaf...

...The children who were born of them took their places naturally, according to their capacity, in the Portuguese scheme of things, and many of them—without anyone regarding it as extraordinary—distinguished themselves in the service of the state...

...Ostensibly, censorship is concerned only with matters of defense and foreign affairs...

...Liberty and authority are two incompatible conceptions...

...Watching Irish farmers selling their calves at the Donegal fair, laughing at the histrionics of the professional "split-the-differs" and cursing the hard-bitten cattle buyers in fluent Gaelic, I recalled a similar fair I had attended in one of Portugal's best cattle-raising districts...

...all clad in the traditional costume of patched pink-and-blue pantaloons, yoke themselves to the draglines of a big net...

...Looka the fishermen...

...In 1947, Henrique de Barros, professor of agriculture and brother-in-law of Marcello Caetano, present Minister of the Presidency, headed a Government inquiry into the condition of Portuguese farmers...

...Its fruits became apparent when Nehru attempted to dissolve Portuguese sovereignty over Goa, that "pimple on the face of India," and annex it to the Indian Union...

...Even if all of Portugal's hungry peasants were fed, and if all of Lisbon's slum dwellers could move to the charming villas which the Government provides for its bureaucracy, there would still be something lacking...

...The Portuguese fishing industry is equally primitive...

...Since then, he has made other liberal gestures...

...No, this has gone on year after year, generation after generation, while we have all hoped for better days and for public measures that would relieve this misery...

...In 1941, 6,260 emigrants left metropolitan Portugal...

...The economic condition of the poor people," wrote the Archbishop, "has not improved...

...But neither he nor his associates have ever repudiated earlier statements like the following, quoted from official propaganda publications: "We are anti-parliamentary, anti-democratic, anti-liberal, and we are firmly resolved to establish a corporate state on the model of Italian corporativism...

...In about two hours, they manage to haul it ashore...

...That was in 1954, a bad crop year, but also a year after the launching of Portugal's six-year Development Plan...

...How seriously have the Portuguese colonizers endeavored to realize their avowed goal of civilizing the native population and assimilating it to the European community...

...In 1955, the figure was 29,796...

...Our dictatorship obviously resembles a fascist dictatorship in its reinforcement of authority, in its open war on certain principles of democracy, in its markedly nationalistic character, in its concern for social order...

...Government take 18 per cent of every fish they sell...

...on the contrary, it worsens pitiably from year to year...

...It is important to note, however, that this loyalty antedates the Salazar regime, which passed the unpopular Colonization Act of 1933...

...Neither has Salazar...

...The proof of this misery is becoming ever more lamentable, so that today I find myself unable to remain silent...

...Here are today's casualties," said one opposition editor, tossing a sheaf of mangled proofs across his desk...

...Portugal was a poor country a century ago, but French travelers described the sturdy, hard-working Portuguese peasants as "toujours gais...

...By 1940, however, when he became head of the Portuguese youth movement, he had sobered sufficiently to perform a notable good deed to which his liberal friends still point with pride...

...He was a retired fisherman who had lived and worked in Gloucester, Massachusetts for 38 years, 14 of them as skipper of his own boat...