Álvaro Cunhal

Biography

On 3 January 1960 eleven prisoners escaped from Peniche fortress, on the Atlantic coast, all of them prominent figures in the Portuguese Communist Party. The escape was made possible by an accomplice among the guards and by coordinated work between people inside the prison and outside it. Álvaro Cunhal was among those who got away.

Salazar’s government claimed that a Soviet submarine was waiting off the coast.

Álvaro Barreirinhas Cunhal was born on 10 November 1913 in Coimbra. His father, Avelino Cunhal, was a lawyer and writer, a republican of liberal views; his mother, Mercedes, was a devout Catholic who took her son to church on Sundays. The family moved to Seia when he was three. He went to primary school once: he saw children being beaten with rulers, told his father at home, and his father kept him out of school and taught him at home. In 1924 the family moved to Lisbon, where he attended the Pedro Nunes and Camões lyceums, played football as a right winger and took up athletics. Years later his bicycle and his habit of running came in useful in the underground. In 1931 he entered the law faculty of the University of Lisbon. There he became acquainted with Marxism, and his mentor in the party was Bento Gonçalves. He formally joined the party, by some accounts, in late 1932, by others in 1934–1935; by 1935 he was already secretary of the Federation of Communist Youth. In 1935 he travelled to Moscow for an international congress, and in 1936 joined the party’s Central Committee. He wrote articles for the journals Seara Nova and O Diabo and for the clandestine Avante! and O Militante.

He was first arrested in June 1937, while distributing leaflets in Lisbon. He spent months in the Aljube prison, where he was tortured, and then served a period of disciplinary military service. During his second imprisonment, in 1940, he was brought under escort to the law faculty to defend his final thesis on the legalisation of abortion; the subject was highly unusual for Portugal at the time, and the mark was 16 out of 20. The examining board included Marcelo Caetano, the future successor to Salazar. After his release Cunhal taught briefly at the Colégio Moderno in Lisbon, and among his pupils was the future president Mário Soares. From December 1941 he lived underground, and by the mid-1940s he was in effect running the party.

On 25 March 1949 he was arrested at a safe house in Luso. At his trial in 1950 he received two years of solitary confinement and eight years of internal exile. For fourteen months he was held incommunicado, then for eight years in complete isolation in a Lisbon prison; in 1958 he was moved to Peniche. In all he spent about thirteen years behind bars (by other counts, fifteen). In 1953 an international campaign for his release began, joined by Jorge Amado and Pablo Neruda, who dedicated to him the poem “Lámpara Marina”. His request for legal exile in 1956 was refused. In his cell he did what circumstances allowed: he drew, wrote and translated. He translated “King Lear” in 1953–1955 under the woman’s pseudonym Maria Manuela Serpa, and the translation was not published until 2002. His prison drawings appeared in two parts under the title “Prison Drawings”; he also designed book covers, among them the first edition of the novel “Esteiros” by Soeiro Pereira Gomes. The novels “Five Days, Five Nights” and “Until Tomorrow, Comrades” he signed Manuel Tiago. He acknowledged the authorship only in the mid-1990s, and sources give different years: 1994 and 1995. It seems to me that this story shows well how he regarded his own public image: he refused to write an autobiography and rarely gave interviews.

After the escape, in March 1961, he became secretary-general of the party in place of the arrested Júlio Fogaça and held the post for thirty-one years. He went into exile in the Soviet Union and then in France, where he lived until the revolution of April 1974. In 1965 the first party congress held outside Portugal took place in Kyiv. In 1968 Cunhal chaired a conference of the communist parties of Western Europe and supported the entry of Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia. He received the Order of the October Revolution in 1973 and the Order of Lenin in 1988.

From Paris he returned to Portugal five days after 25 April 1974, and went straight from the airport to meet General António de Spínola. He was minister without portfolio in four provisional governments, a member of parliament from 1975 to 1992, and from 1982 a member of the Council of State. After the revolution Soares, the leader of the Socialists, became one of his chief political rivals; the Communists and Socialists never formed a united left. In 1992 he was succeeded by Carlos Carvalhas.

In his last years he lived out of public life and went blind. Cunhal died on 13 June 2005 in Lisbon. More than 250,000 people came to his funeral on 15 June; by his own wish, his body was cremated.