In the only photo of her wedding, Conceiçao Matos was surrounded by seven people. None of them was her new husband, Domingos Abrantes. The communist couple married on October 18, 1969, in Peniche prison, some 90 kilometers north of Lisbon, where Abrantes had been imprisoned for four years for his opposition to the dictatorship. During that time, they had been forbidden to see each other or write to each other. They corresponded through relatives. Abrantes managed to send her Christmas cards, anniversary greetings and even a collageof matches that reproduced The loversby Picasso, to celebrate the release of his partner in 1966. “On the day of the wedding they didn’t let us take photos,” Matos recalls in Lisbon, more than five decades later. And that’s why the portrait shows the bride, wearing a borrowed skirt and blouse, with other family members at the gates of the imposing military fortress against which the Atlantic Ocean crashes incessantly.
The same walls where Matos posed are still standing. Now, however, they contain another idea. On April 27, just when it was 50 years since the liberation of all its prisoners thanks to the Carnation Revolution, it reopened its doors as the National Museum of Resistance and Freedom of the Peniche Fortress, inaugurated by the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa. “Our mission is to investigate, preserve and communicate the memory of the resistance to the Portuguese fascist regime based on the testimonies of those who fought for freedom and democracy,” explains the director of the museum, Aida Rechena.
The tribute begins with a memorial installed on the esplanade where the names of the 2,626 prisoners who passed through Peniche between 1934 and 1974 have been engraved, and continues with an exhibition detailing the country they left behind. One of the names inscribed is that of Abrantes, who was released in 1973 after eight years of imprisonment and who had been one of the eight communist prisoners who had humiliated the dictatorship by escaping from Caxias prison in an official car of António de Oliveira Salazar in 1961. Among the battery of tortures he suffered during his second arrest, one cannot rule out beatings as an extra for the tantrum that his escape had provoked in the regime.
Aida Rechena warns that the memorial is incomplete because not all prisoners were registered. The prison bureaucracy had black holes. The Portuguese dictatorship, established by the military in 1926 and continued by Salazar and Marcelo Caetano until 1974, was the longest-lasting in Western Europe. Peniche, which had been a military fortress since the 16th century, became the most sinister symbol of the dictatorship from 1926 onwards, and especially when it passed into the hands of the political police to lock up the most significant opponents. “It was the greatest symbol of fascist repression,” Abrantes said during a meeting in Lisbon. Her story, and that of her partner, both 88 years old, is now told in the museum. Unlike other comrades who have not managed to return to the fortress due to trauma, Abrantes always goes when invited.
The exhibition brings to life the days of the single party, prior censorship, the lack of freedoms and rights, the persecution of dissidents, the solidarity of the residents of Peniche towards the relatives of prisoners and universal police surveillance. “It is important to remind the new generations that freedom is inseparable from resistance and the sacrifice of many people imprisoned or killed; this museum is important against a certain official blackout of fascism,” underlines the former prisoner.
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Salazar, who assumed full power in 1932, proclaimed a Estado Novo that aspired to “reintegrate Portugal into its historical greatness, into the fullness of its universalist civilization of vast empire.” His ideological decalogue is displayed in the museum alongside other propaganda posters about the national trilogy (God, country and family), police listening devices, leaflets about torture, prisoner files or newspaper clippings that recall the political alignments of the Second World War: “On the occasion of Hitler’s death, today the flags of the Apostolic Nunciature, the Spanish embassy, the legations of Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and Japan will remain at half-mast.”
A clandestine resistance against the regime developed in factories, fields, colleges and prisons. Prisoners mobilised to improve their living conditions and to continue to engage in politics by evading control with shoes, cooking pots or clothespins with hidden compartments. In addition to the objects, stories are remembered such as that of Catarina Eufémia, the Alentejan harvester who died with her son in her arms, shot by a lieutenant while participating in a protest to demand better wages.
The repressive system of the Portuguese dictatorship included 14 prisons in Europe and 37 jails or concentration camps in Africa. It was one of the pillars of the International Police for the Defense of the State (PIDE), which also had the special power to prolong the confinement of prisoners who had already served their sentence or to imprison them indefinitely without bringing them to trial.
Banning wedding photos was an exercise in cruelty, but a small thing compared to the catalogue of tortures deployed by the political police: whipping with the so-called sea horse, sleep deprivation, torture of the statue or isolation. In the punishment cells of Peniche, baptized by the prisoners as The Secretwere held in solitary confinement, with no ventilation, no room to move, no visitors and sometimes with no food other than bread and water. “If any guard made a small gesture of humanity towards us, they were moved,” recalls Domingos Abrantes, who was isolated throughout his confinement. Silence was a universal commandment. The common rooms had iron bars to ensure constant observation and dangerous prisoners, such as the communist Álvaro Cunhal, were placed in high-security cells on the third floor. “Generally, the inmates were locked up for 20 hours and only met in the dining room, where the guards went so far as to forbid them to smile,” notes historian Irene Flunser Pimentel in her book The history of PIDE.
Peniche also experienced legendary escapes. It was not easy to escape from a military fortress built four centuries ago as a stone peninsula that seems to be jutting out into the ocean. On January 3, 1960, however, ten people escaped, including Álvaro Cunhal, who managed to cross the Iron Curtain and settle in Moscow, where he would be elected Secretary General of the Portuguese Communist Party. Cunhal had already spent 15 years behind bars, in different stages, when he lowered himself down a rope made from scraps of blankets to escape. Apart from establishing himself in an orthodoxy from which he would never deviate, no matter what walls fell, Cunhal took advantage of his confinement to write a doctoral thesis on abortion and several novels that he published under the pseudonym Manuel Tiago.
A cell now evokes his confinement, but it could have been a room for tourists if the 2016 project by António Costa’s government to convert part of the fortress into a hotel had been successful. “The Socialist Party, surprisingly, has put many obstacles in the way of building the museum. Making a luxury hotel was an insult to the resistance and all its suffering,” says Abrantes. The project was frustrated by opposition from former political prisoners, who mobilised to prevent it. In democracy, their fight was for the right to memory.
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