April Was the Crudest Month

With the resignation of President Antonio de Spínola the first phase of Portugal’s revolution has come to a bitter and disappointing end. Portugal today is less free, less prosperous, and less happy than at any time since the early days of Salazar. What looked like the dawning of a new day now seems like nothing more than the first rumblings of a Communist takeover. “We have witnessed nothing more than a change of impostors,” the Social Democratic historian Armando Cortesáo told me. “Portugal remains unfree.”

Hardly a building in the country has escaped the diligence of the Communist Party’s graffitists and poster plasterers. The smiling visage of Salvador Allende, patron saint of the Portuguese Left, peers down from every building in Lisbon, surrounded by slogans declaring “Death to Fascists.” With the exception of the Socialist weekly, Expresso, the press is totally under the Party’s control or influence. The few attempts to start non-Communist weeklies have been thwarted by the laws against fascism. Papers that refuse to follow the Party line are either suspended and fined, or banned outright.

PW

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Peter P. Witonski

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With the resignation of President Antonio de Spínola the first phase of Portugal’s revolution has come to a bitter and disappointing end. Portugal today is less free, less prosperous, and less happy than at any time since the early days of Salazar. What looked like the dawning of a new day now seems like nothing more than the first rumblings of a Communist takeover. “We have witnessed nothing more than a change of impostors,” the Social Democratic historian Armando Cortesáo told me. “Portugal remains unfree.”

Hardly a building in the country has escaped the diligence of the Communist Party’s graffitists and poster plasterers. The smiling visage of Salvador Allende, patron saint of the Portuguese Left, peers down from every building in Lisbon, surrounded by slogans declaring “Death to Fascists.” With the exception of the Socialist weekly, Expresso, the press is totally under the Party’s control or influence. The few attempts to start non-Communist weeklies have been thwarted by the laws against fascism. Papers that refuse to follow the Party line are either suspended and fined, or banned outright.