Álvaro Cunhal: prisoner, escapee and Portugal's communist leader

On 3 January 1960 a car stopped in the square in front of the fortress at Peniche, a fishing town on the Atlantic coast north of Lisbon. The driver was the actor Rogério Paulo, and the boot of the car was open. Inside the walls, ten political prisoners had been waiting for exactly that signal.2 sources2 sources

One by one they climbed down the fortress walls on a rope. In the outer moat they got over another wall, and in the town three cars were waiting to drive them away. A guard who was in on the plan took part in the escape. The sources differ on whether he was a prison warder or a soldier of the Republican National Guard (GNR), the gendarmerie that patrolled the fortress perimeter.3 sources3 sources

The best-known of the ten was Álvaro Cunhal, aged 46. He had been in prison for nearly eleven years, most of that time alone in a cell. Within fifteen months of the escape he was secretary-general of the Portuguese Communist Party, a post he held for the next three decades.2 sources2 sources

Álvaro Barreirinhas Cunhal was born on 10 November 1913 in the parish of Sé Nova, in the university city of Coimbra, the son of Avelino and Mercedes Cunhal. He spent part of his childhood in Seia, in the foothills of the Serra da Estrela, and moved with his family to Lisbon at the age of eleven. There he went to two state secondary schools, first the Liceu Pedro Nunes and then the Liceu Camões.2 sources2 sources

In 1931 he entered the Law Faculty in Lisbon and joined the Communist Party the same year. In 1934 the students elected him as their representative on the University Senate. In 1935 he became secretary-general of the Federation of Portuguese Communist Youth, travelled to Moscow for a congress of the Communist Youth International and joined the party's corps of full-time clandestine militants.3 sources3 sources

The police first caught him in June 1937. He was taken to the Aljube prison in Lisbon and then to Peniche. According to the Diário de Notícias he was freed about a year later and made to do his military service in the Penamacor Disciplinary Company, a punishment unit. In May 1940 he was arrested again. That year he sat his final law examination at the faculty under police escort and passed with 16 out of 20.1 source1 source

His party says he was tortured after both arrests, held for “a few months” each time and went straight back to clandestine work once freed. He took part in the reorganisation of the PCP in 1940 and 1941 and sat on its Secretariat, the small group that ran the party day to day, from 1942 to 1949.2 sources2 sources

In November 1948 Cunhal and the activist Sofia Ferreira rented a house at Casal de Santo António, in the spa town of Luso, posing as a couple called Manuel and Elvira who had come for their health. Militão Ribeiro, a party leader on the run, later joined them. At five in the morning on 25 March 1949 six PIDE agents and a group of armed GNR men raided the house and arrested all three.2 sources2 sources

Militão Ribeiro died in prison in January 1950, during a hunger strike against the conditions there. Sofia Ferreira spent three years behind bars. Cunhal would not be free again for nearly eleven years.1 source1 source

He was tried about a year after his arrest. On 2 May 1950 he used his statement to the court to accuse the dictatorship and defend his party. He also described the solitary confinement he had been kept in since his arrest.3 sources3 sources

Convicted, he served his sentence in the Lisbon Penitentiary and was moved to Peniche in 1958. By the PCP's count he spent about eight of his eleven years in complete isolation. In 1953 writers and artists abroad campaigned for his release, and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote the poem “Lámpara marina” for him.2 sources2 sources

In prison he drew and wrote fiction. The drawings he made there were later published as Desenhos da Prisão (Prison Drawings). His first novel, Até Amanhã, Camaradas (“Until Tomorrow, Comrades”), about the life of clandestine communists, was written during his imprisonment, though it did not appear until 1974.2 sources2 sources

Peniche was one of the regime's high-security prisons. From 1953 it rebuilt the old fortress as a modern prison modelled on American high-security jails, with three cell blocks. The top floor of Block C held the inmates the regime considered most dangerous, kept apart from everyone else. It was from there that the ten men escaped in 1960.1 source1 source

Guards from the prison service watched the cell blocks, the GNR watched the perimeter, and PIDE agents kept the gate. The visiting room, rebuilt in 1968, was laid out to prevent any physical contact, and prisoners and families had to speak loudly enough for the guards to hear every word. A prisoner who broke the rules could lose his visits or his exercise, or be sent to the punishment cell in the round fort that inmates called the Segredo.1 source1 source

Inside, Cunhal sat on the escape committee with Jaime Serra and Joaquim Gomes. Outside, the party leaders Pires Jorge and António Dias Lourenço organised the operation, helped by Octávio Pato, Rui Perdigão and Rogério Paulo. The other escapees were Carlos Costa, Francisco Miguel, José Carlos, Guilherme Carvalho, Pedro Soares, Rogério de Carvalho and Francisco Martins Rodrigues.2 sources2 sources

The escape made headlines around the world. The regime hunted for the fugitives and tightened security in its prisons. Inside the PCP, according to a party publication quoted by the historian José Pacheco Pereira, membership and the print run of the clandestine newspaper Avante! both doubled between late 1959 and late 1961.2 sources2 sources

By his biographer José Pacheco Pereira's account, Cunhal spent about eighteen months in hiding in Portugal after the escape, moving between safe houses; the Diário de Notícias says about two years. His daughter was born at the end of 1960. In March 1961 he was elected secretary-general, and soon afterwards, as the police closed in on the party leadership again, he left for exile, which was at first meant to be temporary.3 sources3 sources

He lived in the Soviet Union until 1966 and then in France. Through the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s he sided firmly with Moscow.2 sources2 sources

In April 1964 he presented Rumo à Vitória (“The Road to Victory”), the programme that set out the party's tasks in what it called the democratic and national revolution. Against those in the party who hoped for a peaceful transition from the dictatorship, it argued for bringing the regime down by a national armed uprising. In the 1960s, observes João Arsénio Nunes, a historian reviewing Pacheco Pereira's biography, nobody foresaw a revolution made by mid-ranking officers, but the PCP came closest.2 sources2 sources

In August 1968 Warsaw Pact troops crushed the Prague Spring, Alexander Dubček's attempt to liberalise communist Czechoslovakia. The French, Italian and Spanish communist parties were reluctant to back the invasion. The PCP's paper Avante! had written warmly of Dubček's reforms, but Cunhal backed Moscow, and several party members in Prague, Geneva and Paris broke with the leadership in protest.1 source1 source

On 25 April 1974 the Armed Forces Movement (MFA), a group of junior officers, overthrew the Estado Novo. Two days later the political prisoners in Peniche walked free. Cunhal came home from exile on 30 April, after nearly forty years of underground life and prison. A crowd met him at the airport, and he spoke from the top of a tank; Mário Soares later wrote that, standing between a soldier and a sailor, Cunhal reminded him of Lenin.4 sources4 sources

He became minister without portfolio in the first four provisional governments. In the election for the Constituent Assembly on 25 April 1975, the first free election with universal suffrage in Portuguese history, the PCP won 12.5 per cent of the vote. The Socialists of Mário Soares won 37.9 per cent.3 sources3 sources

The Socialist leadership accused the PCP of wanting to impose a communist dictatorship, and the quarrel came to a head over the Lisbon daily República. On 19 May 1975 a committee of its printers and office staff, communist and far-left in outlook, declared the paper's Socialist-leaning editors dismissed. That day the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci was interviewing Soares, who told her the editors had been held captive by communist printers.2 sources2 sources

Fallaci then interviewed Cunhal, and the magazine L'Europeo published the conversation on 13 June. In it Cunhal called the Socialists hysterical and said of the República workers: “They did very well.” He was also quoted as saying: “I promise you there will be no parliament in Portugal.” Both lines are translated from the Italian of Fallaci's published text.1 source1 source

The PCP issued a statement saying some of his words had been distorted. Domingos Lopes, who worked in Cunhal's ministerial office in 1974 and 1975 and left the party in 2009, said in 2020 that Fallaci had misreported him: in his view Cunhal meant that Portugal would not be a Western-style democracy but a different kind, built on a large public sector and land reform.2 sources2 sources

On 10 July the Socialists walked out of the provisional government, citing the República affair. The Fifth Government, sworn in on 8 August under Vasco Gonçalves, an officer the PCP trusted, had the formal backing only of the PCP and its ally the MDP/CDE. Cunhal told his Central Committee two days later that it was likely to fail and could drag the party down with it.1 source1 source

Through the summer and autumn PCP offices in the north were attacked and set on fire, and rallies of the centre-right PPD in the south were broken up with stones and gunfire. Cunhal blamed the Socialists for fanning the anti-communism behind the arson. Much of the argument was carried on abroad: in 1975 politicians and officers often made their most striking statements to foreign newspapers, and the República affair was followed closely in France and Italy.3 sources3 sources

Historians still disagree about what Cunhal was trying to do. The British historian Kenneth Maxwell wrote that in the summer of 1975 the communists made the last serious attempt to seize power in Western Europe, and Carlos Gaspar that the PCP wanted power but was forced back by the balance of forces. Raquel Varela, who worked through the party's documents of the period, argues that it fought the Socialists hard for posts in the state, the army and the press but never attempted a putsch.1 source1 source

Early November 1975 brought bomb attacks and almost daily rumours of coups. On the night of Thursday 6 November, Cunhal and Soares faced each other in the RTP studios at Lumiar, moderated by the journalists Joaquim Letria and José Carlos Megre. They had already debated once, in July on French television, but that broadcast was seen only in France.1 source1 source

About half an hour in, Soares told Cunhal that what the Communist Party had shown in recent months was that it wanted to turn Portugal into a dictatorship. Cunhal replied: “Olhe que não, olhe que não” (“Not so, not so”). The phrase entered Portuguese political vocabulary.2 sources2 sources

Soares, discussing a possible pact between their parties, said it would earn him a Lenin medal and leave Portugal with a dictatorship. The newspaper A Luta reported that the streets emptied and only two of Lisbon's twenty cinemas had normal audiences that night.2 sources2 sources

Nineteen days later, on 25 November 1975, a revolt by paratroopers was put down, and with it the most radical phase of the revolution ended. The PCP denied any part in planning a coup. When the Constituent Assembly met on 2 December, every party except the small MDP/CDE accused it, while the far-left UDP attacked it from the other side for abandoning the paratroopers.3 sources3 sources

Cunhal never held government office again. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1975 and to the Assembly of the Republic at every election from 1976 to 1987, and sat on the Council of State, the President's advisory body, from 1982 to 1992. Under his leadership the PCP and its electoral allies won between 12 and 19 per cent of the vote until the late 1980s, then fell to under 9 per cent in 1991.2 sources2 sources

The party claimed 115,000 members in 1976 and 200,753 in 1983, half of whom paid no dues. Cunhal kept it closely aligned with the Soviet Union. At the 14th Congress in 1992 he stepped down as secretary-general and became president of the party's National Council; when that body was abolished in 1996 he stayed on the Central Committee.4 sources4 sources

He also published essays on aesthetics, collected in A Arte, o Artista e a Sociedade (Art, the Artist and Society), drawings and paintings, and a translation of Shakespeare's King Lear. His political books range from a study of class struggle in medieval Portugal to his own account of the revolution.1 source1 source

Cunhal died on 13 June 2005, aged 91, already very frail. Two days later his coffin was carried through Lisbon to the Alto de São João cemetery in a cortege that lasted more than two hours. The PCP put the crowd at hundreds of thousands; the newspaper Observador, looking back ten years later, wrote of tens of thousands.2 sources2 sources

On the day he died, Mário Soares, his great opponent of 1975, wrote of him:1 source1 source

His admirers remember the student who chose a life of hiding, prison and exile, and the prisoner who described his torture to the court that tried him. His critics remember the leader who backed the Soviet Union over Czechoslovakia and whose party, in 1975, seemed to many to be reaching for power that the voters had not given it.5 sources5 sources

Peniche fortress, where he was held twice, is now the Museu Nacional Resistência e Liberdade. It opened officially on 27 April 2024, fifty years to the day after the last 36 political prisoners walked out. A steel memorial there carries the names of about 3,000 people who passed through the prison.2 sources2 sources