Celeste Caeiro, the woman who gave her name to the revolution in Portugal with her carnations, died this Friday at the age of 91, her granddaughter Carol confirmed on her social networks. Caeiro’s death came as this year, April 25, marked the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, which ended the dictatorship.
Born to a Spanish mother, this woman was working in the closet of a restaurant in the center of Lisbon, “Sifire”, at the time of the uprising. As she herself explained in an interview with EFE in 2014, the restaurant’s owners wanted to organize a party on April 25, 1974 to celebrate the establishment’s first anniversary and they bought 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 should 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 going on, but not before grabbing several red and white carnations under his 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? “We are going to the Carmo barracks, where Marcello Caetano is, the president (heir to the Salazar regime),” they replied, according to the story Caeiro told EFE.
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. Since I’m so small and he was on top of the tank, he had to reach out and grab the eyelet and put it in his rifle,” she said herself. Immediately, the rest of the soldiers imitated their companion and asked the woman for one of those red and white carnations that she carried under her arm, until they were all distributed.
She, a member of the Communist Party, did not expect this simple gesture to go down in 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.
