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The MFA-Radicals: The East European Communist Frame
Vasco Gonçalves, Lisbon, February 14–15, 1991 ▸
On the afternoon of Thursday, 14 February 1991, and again the next morning, Dr. Manuel met Vasco Gonçalves at his apartment in the Avenida dos Estados Unidos area of Lisbon. It was a very touching experience. He had a warm home, and his twelve-year-old grandson stopped by the study several times to say hello and to hug his grandfather.
This interview had a different feel from the others: Gonçalves tried hard to make Dr. Manuel understand his hopes, his fears and the strategic decisions he had made as prime minister, and he spoke almost plaintively of his failed efforts to work with the Catholic Church, and of his worry that the cultural dynamization campaigns of the summer of 1975 would provoke a popular backlash around Fátima. He had so much to say that the first session ran over four hours and Dr. Manuel had to return the following day. Gonçalves was keen to show him his little books, a Marxist collection from what appeared to be the Que sais-je? series of the Presses Universitaires de France, in Portuguese translation.
An army engineering officer and one of the senior members of the Movement of Captains, fifty-two in 1974 and the son of a well-known Benfica footballer, he served as prime minister of the second through fifth provisional governments, from 18 July 1974 to September 1975, through the most radical phase of the revolution, and was best known for the nationalization of the banks and insurance companies after the failed coup attempt of 11 March 1975. Removed as prime minister at the end of August 1975 and named chief of the general staff of the armed forces, he was forced out of that post as well after the MFA assembly at Tancos on 5 September. He died on 11 June 2005.
Rosa Coutinho, Lisbon, February 15, 1991 ▸
Dr. Manuel met Rosa Coutinho on Friday, 15 February 1991, at an office near Saldanha, where he was then working in import-export with Angola. Coutinho was intense, a chain smoker, with a wry smile that stayed with him throughout the interview. At first he regarded his American visitor with some distrust; when he realized that Dr. Manuel was a luso-descendente [of Portuguese descent], he became more welcoming. Well known for his communist views, the “Red Admiral” offered interpretations of the revolution consistent with that background.
A naval officer who had spent most of his career on hydrographic survey ships, and who in the 1960s had been held prisoner for several months by the guerrillas of the FNLA after his capture on the Zaire River, he was named to the National Salvation Junta after April 25, promoted to vice-admiral, and charged with dismantling the PIDE, the political police, and the Portuguese Legion.
Angola made his name. When the last governor-general resigned in July 1974, Rosa Coutinho went to Luanda as president of the governing junta, and in September he was confirmed as high commissioner, a post he held until the Alvor Agreement of January 1975. Of the three liberation movements, he favored the MPLA, the movement strongest in Luanda and closest ideologically to the Portuguese left. Working with the MFA’s coordinating commission in Angola, he neutralized the white separatist groups in the capital, which consolidated the MPLA’s dominant position there; he placed MPLA forces alongside Portuguese troops in Cabinda against the FLEC separatists backed by Zaire, blocking the enclave’s secession; he transferred to the MPLA the Katangese units that had served within the Portuguese forces; and he distributed Portuguese arms to the movement.
That record, together with positions in 1975 close to those of Álvaro Cunhal’s Communist Party, earned him the name “Red Admiral.” His critics, then and since, have charged that he delivered Angola to the MPLA and opened the way to Soviet and Cuban influence there; the large-scale Cuban intervention, armed by the Soviet Union, came in the autumn of 1975, some months after he had left Luanda.
Back in Lisbon, he pressed in early 1975 for “revolutionary laws” to radicalize the process, and after 11 March he sat on the Council of the Revolution. On 25 November 1975, despite his reputation, he carried out President Costa Gomes’s instructions to demobilize the naval units on the south bank of the Tagus that had at first supported the uprising. He was removed from the Council afterward and passed to the naval reserve, and he did not return to the front rank of politics, though he remained close to the Communist Party and active in the Angolan solidarity movement. He died on 2 June 2010.
The MFA-Populists: The Third World Revolutionary Frame
Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, Lisbon, December 11, 1990 ▸
On the morning of Tuesday, 11 December 1990, Dr. Manuel met Otelo at the offices of the Associação 25 de Abril in Lisbon. It was an amazing experience; from the first moment it felt like talking with an old friend. Otelo was incredibly charismatic, engaged, and fully aware of his place in history.
As the chief strategist of the 25 April coup, he shared his battle plans for victory, including the midnight playing of Zeca Afonso’s “Grândola, Vila Morena” on national radio as the go-signal, the military takeover of all television and media outlets, and the closing of the roads to Spain for fear of a Franco-led invasion.
He also spoke of his disappointment that the revolution did not lead to deeper social transformations, and of how and why President Costa Gomes kept him busy on 25 November 1975 and so avoided a civil war, something he too had wanted to avoid: the point of 25 April, he said, was to create a better Portugal, and not for brothers to kill brothers.
Born in Lourenço Marques, in Mozambique, in 1936, he was promoted to brigadier in July 1974 and given command of COPCON, the operational command for the mainland, a post he lost after 25 November 1975. He ran for president in 1976, finishing second to Ramalho Eanes with about 16.5 percent of the vote, and ran again in 1980. Arrested in 1984 and convicted in the FP-25 case, he was released in 1989 and later covered by the amnesty that parliament approved in 1996.
Dr. Manuel revisited the interview with him in 2018 and 2019 while preparing the book, and Otelo was gracious and generous with his time throughout. He died in Lisbon on 25 July 2021.
Mário Tomé, Lisbon, February 13, 1991 ▸
On the cold morning of 13 February 1991, Mário Tomé welcomed Dr. Manuel warmly to his Lisbon apartment and offered him refreshments. He was pensive and thoughtful, a man of serious demeanor and a deep thinker, weighing each question carefully before he responded. He was quite upset with the direction of the country in 1991, feeling that the hope of 25 April 1974 had yet to be realized.
Born in Estremoz in 1940, he had served in the colonial wars, where he was decorated, and in Mozambique he was aide-de-camp to General Kaúlza de Arriaga. On 25 April he was in Mozambique, where he sat on the MFA’s coordinating committee; he returned to Lisbon in July 1974 and, after 11 March 1975, served with the Military Police. He was taken prisoner following the failed populist-led coup attempt of 25 November 1975 and was freed from jail on 23 April 1976. He was twice elected to the Assembleia da República on the list of the União Democrática Popular, which he later led, and he belongs today to the Bloco de Esquerda.