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There is an increasing sense that a line is being drawn under an important era in Portugal's recent history. I say this because two of the leading political actors of the 1974 coup and the ensuing two year revolution died within two days of each other. Vasco Gonçalves was Prime Minister from 19 July 1974 to 29 August 1975, the most radical phase of the Portuguese revolution. During his time in office, Gonçalves, who was a military appointee during the period of Provisional Governments, became increasingly sympathetic towards and supportive of the positions adopted by the Portuguese Communist Party - so much so that he became known as Comrade Gonçalves. Gonçalves died on 11 June. Álvaro Cunhal, who died on 13 June, had been a member of the Portuguese Communist Party from the earliest years of its existence, and was a leading figure in the opposition to Salazar and his authoritarian regime. During the 1930s Cunhal was arrested by the regime's police and sentenced to imprisonment at the disease-ridden fortress of Tarrafal on Cape Verde; however, whilst waiting to be transported, he managed to slip his guards and make good his escape to Moscow. From his exile in the Soviet Union, Cunhal became the leader of the clandestine communist party - the only organised left-wing opposition political party that remained in Portugal throughout the dictatorship. Following the successful military coup of 25 April 1974, Cunhal returned to Lisbon, where he expected the PCP to become the party of government. Fate was against him, though, as the PCP were soundly beaten into third place at the 1975 elections to the Constituent Assembly. This was a result that Cunhal would not accept, and this rejection only fed the flames of revolution, and led directly to Portugal's Verão Quente (Hot Summer) of 1975, when the PCP led a wave of land, factory and property occupations and expropriations, and when supporters of the PCP attempted to prevent deputies from entering parliament. The upshot of this was that the PCP became increasingly marginalised, with them eventually losing the only significant political actor who was sympathetic to their cause, with the removal of Vasco Gonçalves from office at the end of August 1975. Cunhal continued to lead the PCP until 1992, presiding over a declining and ageing political movement that is virtually restricted to small geographic areas in the Alentejo. He continued to be a thorn in the side of the party's new leaders - men who wanted to modernise the party and move away from the Stalinist orthodoxy - and led the conservative faction opposing any softening of the party line. As a sideline, Cunhal was also a fairly successful author, writing several novels under the nome-de-plume, Manuel Tiago - the most significant of which was Cinco Dias, Cinco Noites (Five Days, Five Nights), which was made into an award-winning film in 1996. With the death of these two intransigent political figures, the Carnation Revolution moves even further into history. As I have said before, however (if you are interested, here is the short discussion paper on this matter that I had published in the French journal Lusotopie a couple of years back [PDF]), that is no bad thing. BTW - another photo from Lisbon, taken a couple of weeks ago!

Long-haired Liam was swinging Ross at Foyers last year