Álvaro Cunhal

Álvaro Cunhal
Minister without Portfolio
In office 16 May 1974 – 8 August 1975
Prime Minister	Adelino da Palma Carlos Vasco Gonçalves
Preceded by	Office established
Succeeded by	Jorge Campinos (politician)
General Secretary of the Portuguese Communist Party
In office 31 March 1961 – 5 December 1992
Preceded by	Bento Gonçalves
Succeeded by	Carlos Carvalhas
Member of the Assembly of the Republic
In office 3 June 1976 – 12 August 1987
Constituency	Lisbon
Personal details
Born	Álvaro Barreirinhas Cunhal (1913-11-10)10 November 1913 Coimbra, Portugal
Died	13 June 2005(2005-06-13) (aged 91) Lisbon, Portugal
Political party	Portuguese Communist Party (1931–2005)
Domestic partner	Isaura Moreira (1960–1965)
Children	Ana Cunhal
Alma mater	University of Lisbon

Álvaro Barreirinhas Cunhal (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈalvɐɾu kuˈɲal]; 10 November 1913 – 13 June 2005) was a Portuguese communist revolutionary and politician. He was one of the major opponents of the dictatorial regime of the Estado Novo. He served as secretary-general of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) from 1961 to 1992.^[1] He is described as one of the biggest political and intellectual figures of Portugal in the 20th century.

This article contains weasel words: vague phrasing that often accompanies biased or unverifiable information. Such statements should be clarified or removed. (December 2024)

Cunhal was born in Coimbra on November 10th 1913, the son of Avelino Henriques da Costa Cunhal (Seia, 28 October 1887 – Coimbra, Sé Nova, 19 December 1966) and Mercedes Simões Ferreira Barreirinhas (m. Coimbra, Sé Nova, 22 August 1908) (Coimbra, Sé Nova, 5 May 1888 – Lisbon, 12 September 1971). He was the third of four siblings: António José (Coimbra, 1909–1933), Maria Mansueta (1912–1921) and Maria Eugénia (1927–2015).^[2] The family moved to Seia when Cunhal was three years old.^[3] There, he didn't attend primary school, given the teacher's violence, and would start studying in his home with his father, who was a lawyer and writer, and since 1918 held the position of municipal administrator.^[4]

"In Seia I went to the first day of school and it was a spectacle of savagery, giving out slaps and hitting the kids with rulers. In that school that's how the education was. And I left school and went home, I told my father what I saw and so I didn't go back to school."

Cunhal was baptized on 5 May 1919 in Seia's mother church; his godfather was his brother António José, then 10, and the godmother was the Immaculate Conception.^[5]

When he was a child, he accompanied his mother to church every Sunday, she had a religious way of thinking and living. His father, that had a liberal mindset, was in the origin of Cunhal's "irreverent and creative personality". His father derogatorily denounced the feudal titles, something that reflected in his tales, and, in another work of his, he denounced the friendship between a priest and an old nobleman when it came to addiction of games of chance and drinking.^[6] Eugénia Cunhal, despite the omnipresent rejection of this world in Cunhal's political life, talked about the "opening of her father's spirit" when he "showed his children the Old Testament and appealed that each one formed its own conscience".^[7] His father's republicanism cemented in Cunhal's personality a feeling of "social solidarity" and "political insubmission".^[8] Both Álvaro and Maria Eugénia would later denounce religion.^[6]

His sister Maria Mansueta died 13 January 1921, at nine years old, of tuberculosis, and a year later Avelino Cunhal became the governor of the district of Guarda.^[9] In 1924, the family moved to Lisbon,^[10] initially to Pinheiro Chagas Street, where Maria Eugénia was born in 1927.^[11] Later they would move to a bigger house in Benfica, in Grão Vasco Avenue, when António was already gravely ill.^[12] The need for more space due to the contagiousness of tuberculosis would have been a catalyst for the move.^[13] António José would die at 24, in 1932, of tuberculosis and lung grangrene.^[14] After his brother's death, the family moved again to the centre of Lisbon, first to the 5 de Outubro Avenue, and then to the Miguel Bombarda Avenue, place where Avelino and Eugénia would years later be arrested by PIDE.^[13]

After moving to Lisbon in 1924, he took the Pedro Nunes Lyceum admission exam.^[15] In 1929, the transferred to the Camões Secondary School.^[16] He played football as a right winger; he also played chess, checkers, and card games, and practiced track and field, while also taking part in the publishing of children's books.^[16] What he earned from track and field would become useful when he entered clandestinity, as he had to travel thousand of kilometers on a bicycle to talk with members of the Party.^[16]

He ended secondary school with an average score of 13, and studied law at the University of Lisbon in 1931, right after his 18th birthday. Here he had his first contact with Marxism, and a gradual contact with the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) through books and newspapers.^[17] In the PCP, he had as his main political reference and mentor Bento Gonçalves.^[18]

He visited the Soviet Union for the first time in 1935 to attend the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern in Moscow. He joined the Central Committee of the party in 1936. His first arrest occurred in 1937, at the age of 23.

While in prison, Cunhal submitted his final thesis on the topic of abortion and obtained his law degree (the jury included future Prime Minister Marcello Caetano, who would later replace Salazar). In his thesis, Cunhal supports the legalization of abortion in Portugal, while he also scrutinised the case of abortion in the Soviet Union, who had been made legal during Vladimir Lenin rule but outlawed once again by Stalin, in 1936 (which Cunhal supported, claiming abortion was not practised anymore in the Soviet Union), highlighting the dangers and societal costs of illegal abortions in his country and exploring the reasons that led women to decide to end their pregnancy.^[19] He then taught for some months at the Colégio Moderno, in Lisbon. Among his pupils was the future President of Portugal, Mário Soares, who would become one of his great political rivals after the revolution of 1974. From 1941 to 1949, Cunhal lived "underground" and became the de facto party leader. Arrested by the PIDE in 1949, he remained in prison for 11 years until a spectacular escape from the seaside Peniche Fortress prison in 1960. The government of António Salazar claimed that a Soviet submarine was near the Peniche coast waiting for Cunhal. In 1961, Cunhal was elected as the party's secretary-general, following the death of Bento Gonçalves in the political prisoners colony of Tarrafal in Cape Verde. Cunhal lived in exile in Moscow, where his daughter Ana Cunhal was born on December 25, 1960, and Paris until the Carnation Revolution of April 1974.

Back in Portugal, Cunhal took charge of the newly-legalized Portuguese Communist Party and led the party through the political upheavals which followed the revolution. He was minister without portfolio in several of the provisional governments which followed the revolution of 1974. A faction of army officers seen as aligned with the party dominated the post-revolutionary provisional governments, with the pro-communist prime minister Vasco Gonçalves leading four provisional governments, which brought accusations that the party was attempting to take power via the military. Cunhal was largely responsible for the party's hardline attitude, particularly its hostility towards the Socialist Party led by Soares, which prevented the formation of a united left.

Cunhal left his office in 1992. He was succeeded by Carlos Carvalhas, but his voice remained important in the following years, and he consistently sided with the party's most orthodox wing. He also revealed that under the pseudonym Manuel Tiago he had been the author of several neo-realistic novels. His drawings, made while in prison, were published, revealing his sensibility for the arts, as was also shown by his translation of King Lear by Shakespeare (edited in his last years, and originally written under the female pseudonym Maria Manuela Serpa).

Álvaro Cunhal died in Lisbon in 2005, after several years out of the public eye. His funeral took place on 15 June in Lisbon and was attended by more than 250,000 people.^[20][21]

His only remaining sister Maria Eugénia Cunhal (Lisbon, 17 January 1927 – 10 December 2015) had also been a lifelong party militant. She married in Lisbon on 21 May 1949 the medical doctor Fernando Manuel da Rocha de Medina (Lisbon, 15 March 1924 – Lisbon, 9 September 1965), half-cousin of Ambassador Rui Eduardo Barbosa de Medina, and left four children.

• IV Congresso do Partido Communista Português — O Caminho Para o Derrubamento do Fascismo.
• Duas intervenções numa reunião de quadros.
• Rumo à Vitória - As Tarefas do Partido na Revolução Democrática e Nacional.
• A Questão do Estado, Questão Central de Cada Revolução.
• A Verdade e a Mentira sobre a Revolução de Abril.
• Acção Revolucionária, Capitulação e Aventura.
• O Partido Com Paredes de Vidro.
• A Revolução Portuguesa - O Passado e o Futuro.
• Fracasso e Derrota do Governo de Direita do PSD/Cavaco Silva.
• O 1º Governo PSD e a Resistência Democrática.
• Falência da Política de Direita do PS (1983–1985).
• Os Chamados Governos de Iniciativa Presidencial.

Cunhal was also a fiction writer, with several novels under the pseudonym Manuel Tiago, which he recognized as his own only in 1995. He also made the drawings for the original edition of Soeiro Pereira Gomes' book Esteiros. He published the following books under the pseudonym of Manuel Tiago:

• Até Amanhã, Camaradas (adapted to television series in 2005).
• Cinco Dias, Cinco Noites (adapted to film in 1996).
• A Estrela de Seis Pontas.
• A Casa de Eulália.
• Lutas e Vidas. Um conto.
• Os Corrécios e outros Contos.
• Um Risco na Areia.
• Fronteiras.
• Sala 3 e outros contos.

All the above titles have appeared in English, translated by Eric A. Gordon, published by International Publishers. In the same order:

• Until Tomorrow, Comrades (2023)
• Five Days, Five Nights (2020)
• The Six-Pointed Star (2020)
• Eulalia's House (2021)
• The Slackers and Other Stories (2021)
• A Line in the Sand (2022)
• Border Crossings (2021)
• The 3rd Floor and Other Stories of the Portuguese Resistance (2021) includes Lutas e Vidas (Struggle and Life)

• Armed Revolutionary Action

• Cunha, Carlos. The Portuguese Communist Party’s Strategy for Power, 1921–1986 (Garland, 1992). online

^[1]

• José Pacheco Pereira, Álvaro Cunhal — Uma biografia política, Temas & Debates, Lisbon, 1999, ISBN 972-759-150-7.
• The Guardian - Obituary.
• https://www.avante.pt/pt/2069/pcp/126282/%C3%81lvaro-Cunhal-defendeu-a-tese-de-licenciatura-h%C3%A1-73-anos.htm