Word: cunhal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Portugal, the Communist Party of Alvaro Cunhal, backed by leftist-minded officers of the ruling junta, has emerged as the most zealous and disciplined political group in the country since the April 1974 revolution. Some observers fear that something comparable may eventually happen in neighboring Spain, where the reactionary government of aging Dictator Francisco Franco totters from crisis to crisis...
...much of the past four decades he has been in prison (14 years in all) or in exile. The rest of the time he lurked in a shadowy, hotly pursued underground movement. Even so, Alvaro Cunhal, 61, secretary-general of the Portuguese Communist Party, is surprisingly well known. A brilliant lawyer with blazing black eyes and a mane of thick silver hair, he returned from Eastern Europe to a tumultuous red-banner welcome only a few days after the April 1974 revolution that toppled the old right-wing dictatorship. Since then, with his debonair good looks, smooth manner and legendary...
...Cunhal was born in the town of Se Nova, the son of an impecunious country lawyer. As a law student at Lisbon University, Cunhal received the highest grades ever recorded, even though he had to finish his studies from prison (he was jailed numerous times during that period for being a Communist). In 1935 he went to Moscow for the annual Communist International Youth Congress, where he impressed the party with his eloquent oratory. The following year he was sent to Madrid on a special mission during the first months of the Spanish Civil War. When he tried to slip...
...formed a nucleus of professional revolutionaries, creating a broader-based anti-Fascist movement, and organized strikes, set up an underground press and established relations with the international Communist movement. In 1949 he was caught and again imprisoned. When he managed to escape from the infamous Peniche prison in 1961, Cunhal had spent eight full years in solitary confinement...
...Cunhal asks rhetorically. "Many places. I was a gypsy. But I never ran away from Portugal." Western intelligence sources say that he spent much of that time in Prague. He was reportedly in the Czechoslovak capital in 1968 when the Russians invaded. He publicly came out in support of the invasion. Cunhal tries hard to look and sound like a moderate, advocating a free press, political parties and elections. But he insists that the power of the landowners and monopolies must be ended. Cunhal also says that all existing agreements, including ties with NATO and U.S. base arrangements, should...