Word: cunhal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
SOUTHERN EUROPE. Communists have made gains in Italy, Greece and, most significantly, in Portugal, a strategically vital NATO ally. Last week radical Premier Vasco dos Santos Gonçalves chose a new 21-member Cabinet, including Communist Party Leader Alvaro Cunhal, who is the most rigidly Marxist boss in Western Europe. The further lurch to the left increased fears that Portugal would eventually become a Communist dictatorship. In Washington, Kissinger spoke of "an evolution in which there is a danger that the democratic process may become a sham, and in which parties are getting into a dominant position whose interests...
...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...
...modest man who keeps his private life so quiet that no one even knows whether he is married. Cunhal attributes the party's success to tireless organization. In Path to Victory, published in 1964, he wrote: "Those who witness great struggles by the masses . . . many times imagine that they appear by magic, as a result of spontaneous indignation of the people or perhaps through emotional appeals. The truth is that only through careful organization can they succeed...