Celeste Caeiro, the woman who with her carnations gave the name to the revolution in Portugaldied this Friday at the age of 91, his granddaughter Carol confirmed on her social networks. Caeiro’s death occurred when this year, on April 25, the 50th anniversary of the carnation revolutionwhich ended the dictatorship.
From a Spanish mother, this woman I worked in a restaurant cupboard in the center of Lisbon, the “Sifire”, at the time of the uprising. As she herself explained in a 2014 interview, the restaurant’s owners wanted to throw a party on April 25, 1974 to celebrate the establishment’s first anniversary and had purchased flowers.
That day, when she arrived at work, she found the door closed and the manager told her and the rest of the employees that they would not open because a revolution was underway and they would have to take the flowers so that they do not spoil. . Against the advice of his bosses, Caeiro decided not to go straight home to find out what was happening, but not before. take several red and white carnations under your arm.
He traveled by metro to Lisbon’s Rossio Square, just at the start of Largo do Carmo, where rebel tanks had been awaiting further orders in tense suspense since dawn. “I looked at them and said to a soldier: ‘What is this, what are you doing here?'” “Let’s go to the Carmo barrackswhere is Marcello Caetano, the president (heir to the Salazar regime),” they responded, according to Caeiro’s account.
It was around nine o’clock in the morning and the soldier, who had been on guard for several hours already, asked the woman for a cigarette. As she didn’t smoke, but felt bad about not being able to help the soldier, she offered him one of the carnations she had with her. “I picked up a carnation, the first one was red and he accepted it. Because I’m so small and he was on top of the tank, he had to reach over and grab the eyelet and put it in his rifle,” she said.
Immediately, the rest of the soldiers imitated their companion and they asked the woman for one of those red and white carnations that she carried under her arm, until they were all distributed. She, Member of the Communist Partywe did not expect that with this simple gesture he would enter the history books. And within hours of this episode, several florists were working hard to ensure that no one was missing a single carnation, helping to make it an icon of freedom. His act gave the name to a revolution remembered for its lack of bloodshed.
