ÁLVARO CUNHAL was “the last Stalinist in Western Europe”, a man who spent the first half of his life fighting against the Salazar dictatorship inside and outside Portugal and the second half as an inflexible communist leader who never exercised power.
The high point of his career came in the two years after the Carnation Revolution, the nearly bloodless coup carried out by Portugal’s disaffected armed forces against the tottering regime of Marcelo Caetano, Salazar’s successor. Cunhal participated in the four post-revolution pre-election governments, in which he wielded strong influence through Vasco Gonçalves, the pro-Communist Prime Minister (obituary June 15).
Had his Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) performed better in the elections of April 1975 the country’s recent history might well have been quite different. Henry Kissinger warned of a European Cuba in the making. However, the Socialists led by Mario Soares, himself briefly a communist in the days when they were the only active opposition to Portuguese fascism, emerged as the largest party with 37.9 per cent of the vote.
Cunhal finished in third place with only 12.5 per cent. Yet he continued to behave as if the vote was no measure of his influence, telling a journalist that Portugal would never be a country with democratic freedoms. Álvaro Barreirinhas Cunhal was born the son of a lawyer in 1913 in the ancient university city of Coimbra, The family moved to Lisbon in 1923.
He joined the illegal PCP and League of Friends of the Soviet Union when he was 17, declaring himself “an adopted son of the proletariat”. Five years later he secured a place on the party’s Central Committee and travelled to Moscow as a delegate to an international Communist youth congress.
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He was first imprisoned in 1937. In jail he finished his law degree and had to be temporarily released so he could defend his dissertation, calling for the legalisation of abortion, before a jury of professors. Among the panel was the future dictator Caetano.
In all, Cunhal spent 11 years in prison, during which time he was often tortured and kept in solitary confinement. In January 1960 he and nine othes made a dramatic escape from Peniche, Portugal’s most secure prison. They drugged a jailer and escaped over the walls by tying bedsheets together.
He moved to the Soviet bloc, living in Prague and Moscow, from where he returned in triumph to Portugal five days after the Carnation Revolution in April 1974. But it was his former law student Mario Soares who emerged as the shaper of Portugal’s democracy, while Cunhal stuck to his dogmatic communism, denouncing the Socialist leader as “my intimate enemy”.
He continued to lead his party until 1992, never renouncing his admiration for Stalin. In a message to the PCP at its congress in 2000, which he was too ill to attend, he declared, to the dismay of its reform-minded youthful members: “Our Communist convictions rest on objective reality that some would like to deny or forget.” He sent a final, written message to his party at its congress last year. It concluded, “Long live Marxism-Leninism!” In 1994 he revealed that he was also Manuel Tiago, author of a critically acclaimed trilogy of novels about the resistance years. He continued to write novels and short stories under the name until his death.
He is survived by Ana Maria, the daughter of his relationship with Isaura Maria Moreira who was born in Moscow, and by Fernanda Barroso, his partner in later life.
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Álvaro Cunhal, Portuguese Marxist leader, was born on November 10, 1913. He died on June 13, 2005, aged 91.