A Smooth Shift of Gears
gal. The winter is gray and soggy with an endless flow of rain, totally out of keeping with one’s preconceptions of a land where the sun is always supposed to shine. But then “one’s preconceptions were never very helpful in explaining the vagaries of this tiny Iberian nation. Ever since Prince Henry the Navigator first began the -voyages of discovery that were to carry the Portuguese flag to the four corners of the earth, the Portuguese people have been surprising and baffling those who wished to explain them away in simple terms. There are no easy explanations of a country that in a period of something less than fifty years, between 1460 and 1510, transformed itself from a tather run-of-the-mill Iberian principality into an. empire extending from Africa and India to Brazil. _. To say anything intelligent about contemporary Portugal it is necessary to cut through a great deal of misinformation. No American newspaper maintains a full-time correspondent in Lisbon. The only on-the-spot coverage by the American press is an occasional interview with one of the nation’s few left-wing intellectuals, in which readers will be assured that the Portuguese people are dreadfully unhappy. Such stories have been appearing on and off now for the past forty years, ever since Antdénio de
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