Word: portela
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...Patricia Portela is one of those people who, not too long ago, might have splashed out on a discreet tattoo. On a warm March afternoon, the 20-year-old met some friends in Vigo's waterfront promenade. Portela works in a local clothing store and hopes to be a designer some day; her three friends are in college. Their shiny hair and fashionable clothes betray their prosperous, middle-class background, but even these women are feeling the pinch. Asked how the financial crisis is affecting them, they enumerate a long list: the clothing they can no longer buy, the vacations...
...Portela and her friends are certainly aware they have more to worry about than shopping sprees. Paula Rodríguez, 20, is studying journalism. "But there aren't any jobs in that, so I'll probably just stay in school longer and get another degree," she says. The prospect of owning a home - and the mortgage that comes with it - makes all four girls laugh, so far-fetched does it seem. "How am I going to get a mortgage if I can't even get a job?" scoffs Rodríguez...
...Cuban Perez Prado got America dancing sideways to mambo and cha-cha rhythms with his own "Patricia" and "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White" (a French tune by Louiguy and Jacques Larue). A slew of instrumental hits traded in wanderlust: "Lisbon Antigua" (by Raul Portela, Jose Galhardo and Amaduedo Vale, recorded by Nelson Riddle), "The Poor People of Paris" (Marguerite Monnot's "La Goualante De Pauvre Jean," covered by Les Baxter), "Never on Sunday (Manos Hadjidakis), "Petite Fleur" (composed by expatriate jazz lion Sidney Bechet and Fernand Bonifay, and a 1959 hit for Chris Barber...
Concepcion Portela could not agree less. Maybe it is generational: she is 61. "I am a Marxist," she says. After years in a government ministry, she runs a private business advising foreign investors on joint ventures in tourism, biotechnology, construction. Her job -- which she considers temporary, until "we work our way out of this situation" -- is not to change the system but to preserve it by bringing capital into the country. Cuba, she insists, will never denationalize, never privatize: "I distribute what I produce to others...
...Portela Military Airport in Lisbon, the final stop on the Reagans' Euro- pean trip, they were greeted by President Antonio Ramalho Eanes. Portugal's leader is one of Reagan's biggest European boosters, and the crowd waved American flags and held up a banner reading WE LOVE REAGAN. At the Portuguese parliament, the President laughed off another Communist walkout ("I'm sorry that some of the chairs on the left seem to be uncomfortable") and hailed the host country's eleven-year-old democracy. Said Reagan: "It is the democratic world that is flexible, vibrant and growing --bringing its people...