How the Communists Survived

It is pouring rain. At 2 a.m. a man with a bicycle arrives at a water mill. His shoes and trousers are covered with mud. He knocks at the door.

"What do you want?" "I am the shoemaker from Santarem, "he replies. A second man appears. "Did you bring the measurements?" the second man asks. "Yes, I have them." Vaz then produces the insole of a shoe with part of it missing. Manuel pulls the other part out ofhis pocket. The pieces match. "Enter."

That is a typical incident from Ate Amanha, Camaradas (Until Tomorrow, Comrades), a faintly fictionalized account of life in the Portuguese Communist Party underground. The book, written by a pseudonymous "Manuel Tiago," and currently being widely read in Lisbon, helps explain one of the mysteries of Portuguese politics: how a small Communist Party founded in 1921 as an outgrowth of the working-class anarchist movement emerged as the most cohesive political force in Portugal at the time of the April revolution. For nearly 50 years, its members had been hunted, jailed and tortured by the secret police of the Salazar-Caetano dictatorship. How did they manage to survive?

Even today, party members are reluctant to discuss their underground activities. "After all," says Party Chief Alvaro Cunhal, 61, "we may have to go back underground some day." His deputy, Octavio Pato, claims that good organization has at least partly been the answer: "There were big cells and small cells, a structure that was relatively centralized. The overwhelming majority of the Central Committee was inside Portugal, and that is one of the reasons the party managed to survive." Indeed, according to Antonio Dias Lourenc,o, editor of the Communist weekly Avante, the party emerged from hiding with no fewer than 15,000 paid-up members.

By all accounts, the clandestinidade (the clandestine life) was one of penury and privation, financial sacrifice and personal frustration, torture and sometimes death. Party members frequently worked at night, hiding messages under loose stones in the walls of village huts marked with a thin line of blue pencil. Copies of Avante, which was published at a series of underground presses, were delivered at night and left in trees and under doors or concealed in religious pamphlets. When money was needed for one purpose or another, members staged raffles and bazaars.

There was also some help from outside. Party Chief Cunhal enjoyed close links with Moscow and Prague, where he spent nearly 14 years in exile. He even supported the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia--the only West European party leader to do so. Jan Sejna, a onetime major general in the Czech army who defected in 1968 and is now in Washington, has testified that in an average year, Moscow supplied $820,000 for the Portuguese Communists and rebels in the African colonies. There were other forms of assistance: under orders from the Soviets, Czech Communists printed newspapers and pamphlets for the Portuguese, provided false documents and organized contacts abroad.

To screen out police spies, prospective members were rigorously investigated. PIDE, Salazar's secret police, was never able to infiltrate the topmost echelons of the party, but it did place agents in smaller cells and made frequent arrests. Suspected Communists were tortured to betray other comrades; few broke, but some did not survive. "They were barbarians," says Avante Editor Dias Lourenc,o, who was freed at the time of the revolution after 17 years in prison. Once, he recalls, he spent two nights "under the rubber whip while they tried to get me to talk. All I said was, 'I'm listening.' "

Party Boss Cunhal spent 13 years behind bars, eight of them in solitary. He became something of a legend, even among nonCommunists, for his daring 1960 escape with nine other prisoners from Lisbon's infamous Peniche Prison, which sits on a rocky promontory overlooking the Atlantic. The inmates were aided by a sympathetic guard who marched them one by one underneath his rain cape to a 60-ft. wall overlooking the sea. Using a rope of knotted sheets, they climbed down and were able to swim to shore, where waiting cars picked them up.

Party members used aliases (Cunhal was known as "Duarte," Pato as "Melo" and "Fresao") and did not have legitimate identity papers--a particularly risky status during World War II--thus they were often not even able to send their children to school. The youngsters had to be taught informally at home or packed off to live with relatives. Says Pato: "This was the most painful thing for parents who had to live underground." Many of the children were pressed into service for the party as messengers and typesetters.

The Communist Party's strongest following has traditionally been in the impoverished Alentejo region south of the Tagus River, an area of huge farms owned by absentee landlords. There, tenant sharecroppers and migrant workers barely subsisted producing cork, olives, a few pigs and some wheat. Laborers frequently went hungry in the midst of unworked estates that had been turned into private hunting preserves.

The Communists were also able to capitalize on worker dissatisfaction in Lisbon and other big cities. The old regime advertised Portugal to foreign investors as "a land of cheap labor." The Communists worked persistently within the framework of the legal labor syndicates. By the time of the revolution, they controlled the Bank Workers Union, the Metallurgical Workers Union, the Shopworkers Union and several other major organizations. Their strength was such that in the months prior to the ouster of the old regime, they were able to call out 100,000 workers in wildcat strikes and send thousands of students into the streets--thus setting the stage for the climactic military coup that ended half a century of right-wing dictatorship. Nonetheless, for all their heroism and staying power, the Communists were able to garner only 12.5% of the vote in last April's election--leaving them still very much a minority party.

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