Word: underground
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...pumpkin-like papier-mâché figures in which revolutionaries hid weapons. Lionel Trilling, however, in a new introduction to his Chambers-era roman à clef, The Middle of the Journey, suggests a more bizarre psychological reason: shortly after Chambers quit the Communist Party and emerged from the underground, friends who feared for his life asked him to a Halloween party to establish his public identity and so forestall murder. The memory of this experience may have led Chambers to use a pumpkin in another effort to save himself...
...took over factories or else demanded huge wage increases-often up to 200%. An alphabet soup of initials covered walls, posters and newspapers, as scores of political parties were formed, ranging from monarchist to Maoist. More ominously, the much persecuted Communist Party (see box page 28) emerged from the underground as the nation's most dedicated and cohesive political organization...
That is a typical incident from Até Amanhã, Camaradas (Until Tomorrow, Comrades), a faintly fictionalized account of life in the Portuguese Communist Party underground. The book, written by a pseudonymous "Manuel Tiago," and currently being widely read in Lisbon, helps explain one of the mysteries of Portuguese politics: how a small Communist Party founded in 1921 as an outgrowth of the working-class anarchist movement emerged as the most cohesive political force in Portugal at the time of the April revolution. For nearly 50 years, its members had been hunted, jailed and tortured by the secret police...
Even today, party members are reluctant to discuss their underground activities. "After all," says Party Chief Alvaro Cunhal, 61, "we may have to go back underground some day." His deputy, Octavio Pato, claims that good organization has at least partly been the answer: "There were big cells and small cells, a structure that was relatively centralized. The overwhelming majority of the Central Committee was inside Portugal, and that is one of the reasons the party managed to survive." Indeed, according to António Dias Lourenço, editor of the Communist weekly Avante, the party emerged from hiding with...
...penury and privation, financial sacrifice and personal frustration, torture and sometimes death. Party members frequently worked at night, hiding messages under loose stones in the walls of village huts marked with a thin line of blue pencil. Copies of Avante, which was published at a series of underground presses, were delivered at night and left in trees and under doors or concealed in religious pamphlets. When money was needed for one purpose or another, members staged raffles and bazaars...