Ãlvaro Cunhal
Álvaro Barreirinhas Cunhal (mostly as Álvaro Cunhal, [ aɫvɐɾu kuɲaɫ ], born 10 November 1913 in Coimbra, † 13 June 2005 in Lisbon ) was a Portuguese politician and served from 1961 to 1992 Chairman of the Portuguese Communist Party. He was also a Portuguese politician during the time of the Estado Novo (mostly in exile ) and the Third Republic.
Cunhal began in 1931 to study law at the University of Lisbon and joined in the same year of the banned Communist Party. He made his legal final exam under police guard. After graduation and working as a lawyer, he joined in 1935 at the head of the Federation of Young Communists. In 1936 he was sent to the Spanish Civil War and imprisoned in 1937 upon returning to Portugal immediately. He subsequently participated in the construction of communist cadres groups and has been repeatedly detained. From 1939, he joined as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Portugal to (PCP ). After years in hiding, he was arrested again in 1949 and remained for eleven years in prison, eight of them in solitary confinement until his 1960 together with ten other prisoners by helper managed to escape from the spectacular, north of Lisbon on the coast of Peniche Fortress. By the end of the dictatorship in 1974, he remained in exile for a long time of it in the Soviet Union, most recently in Prague.
On 25 April 1974, four days before the fall of the dictatorship, he returned to Portugal. While the Carnation Revolution, the Communist Party tried to gain influence, contributing more to the fractionation of the movement under Cunhal. In free elections, the party won in the following years 10-20 percent of the vote, with significantly higher percentages in rural Alentejo with a high proportion of agricultural workers and day laborers. From May 1974 to 1975 was Minister without Cunhal own business, but high impact. After a sobering election result for the Communists in the elections in April 1975 retired he and his party out of the government. He commented that his party with the remark that elections are not the most characteristic expression of power and influence. Nevertheless, he was a member of the parliament in Lisbon from 1975 to 1992. In 1992 he handed over the office of the Secretary-General to his successor Carlos Carvalhas.
Cunhal remained the traditional Moscow line connected, the changes of other Communist parties ( Euro communism ), he defended well on how the idea of perestroika under Gorbachev. Also on the social changes in the country, the party presented under his direction only reluctantly. Therefore Cunhal was considered by many as the last Stalinist Europe.
In old age, over ninety years, and without significant influence Cunhal was finally respected by political opponents as a worthy old gentleman, partly due to his artistic inclinations. Cunhal had operated in the course of life as a novelist ( under the pseudonym Manuel Tiago ), an essayist, illustrator and sculptor. His novel Cinco Dias, Cinco Noites (German: " Five days, five nights " ) was filmed in 1996 by director José Fonseca e Costa, and the television Sociedade Independente de Comunicação (SIC ) produced a television mini-series based on his novel Até Amanhã, camaradas (German: "Until morning, comrades " ) implemented in 2005 by director Joaquim Leitão.
In 2007, organized by the public service broadcaster RTP choice of "the greatest Portuguese of all time" (Os Grandes Portugueses ) Cunhal was elected to 2nd place.