2024-04-22 00:22:00
António Paiva had arrived in Paris less than a month ago when he was offered his first trip to Luxembourg. It was in October 1970. “I had run away that summer. I ran away from PIDE, the Portuguese political police, who wanted to arrest me,” he says now in a café in the capital of Luxembourg, fifty years after the dictatorship he fought against collapsed.
He was a member of the Deserters’ Committee, which operated from the city’s eighth arrondissement. During the day he worked waiting tables, at night he went to the Teatro Operário. “In October 1970, a few weeks after arriving, the entire group went to Luxembourg to present a play and a concert for the Portuguese emigration. The star on duty was Zeca Afonso.”
The cover of the magazine that now hits newsstands. © Credits: DR
The delegation traveled by bus. “We had two shows, one at the Maison du Peuple, in Esch, and the other at the Casino Syndical, in Bonnevoie. In the first one we presented a play called ‘The Soldado’, which was very critical of the war in the colonies”, recalls Paiva. “In the second, Zeca sang and there were members of PIDE in the room. It was a mess.”
When he returned to Paris, he told the Committee’s management what had happened. And he regretted that in a country where so many Portuguese worked there was no nucleus of resistance and awareness among the masses. In August 1971, he returned to Luxembourg to create the first cell of Portuguese resistance to the dictatorship. Over the next three years, he would recruit Luxembourgers and Portuguese to help him in the mission. There is an unknown chapter of the wind of freedom that blew in Portugal on April 25, 1974 that was written in a small country in the center of Europe.
Contacto launches special edition on the 25th of April
You can read this entire investigation, and the reports of the protagonists of this story, in the special edition of Contacto that hit newsstands this Saturday. A bilingual magazine, in Portuguese and French, entirely dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the 25th of April. To save.
2024-04-22 00:22:00