Eurovision song was green light to start the Carnation Revolution

Otelo de Carvalho was a brave soldier for Portugal and in 1974 he helped bring democracy to his troubled homeland.

Chief strategist of the the Portuguese Carnation Revolution, Otelo de Carvalho, in Lisbon in 1974: Giorgio Piredda/Sygma via Getty Images.

OBITUARY

Otelo de Carvalho

Revolutionary soldier. Born Mozambique, August 31, 1936; died July 25, Lisbon. Aged 84.

The 1974 Eurovision Song Contest was unremarkable except for the runaway winner being ABBA and its first international hit, Waterloo. Australia’s Olivia Newton-John competed for England with Long Live Love, a song neither she nor many others liked, but still came fourth.

Equal last in a four-way tie was Portuguese singer Paulo de Carvalho, who had been a member of the Sheiks, Portugal’s response to the Beatles. They occasionally still perform. Carvalho, sounding like a poor man’s Charles Aznavour, sang the unremarkable E Depois do Adeus (And After the Farewell) which had been written for the contest. It failed to excite the Euro­vision judges but it caught the ear of a Portuguese soldier, Otelo de Carvalho, a veteran of his country’s colonial wars in Africa. (The two are not related – it’s a common surname.)

Otelo – his parents named him after Shakespeare’s Moorish general Othello – had joined a secret company of left-wing soldiers called the Movimento das Forcas Armadas (Armed Forces Movement). They were primarily disgruntled military men seeking back pay and an end to the sordid bloodshed as Portugal sought to hold on to its African territories, and who opposed planned changes to the structure of the military.

By 1974 Portugal’s economy, aided by its overseas possessions, was relatively buoyant, but the average Portuguese was not much more than half as wealthy as their European neighbours. The so-called New State regime of Marcello Caetano continued the right-wing authoritarian dictatorship of Antonio Salazar, who had run the nation since 1932, the economy largely in the hands of favoured families, with newspapers and books censored, and political freedoms and civil liberties oppressed by murderous secret police.

The rebel officers began organising a coup early in 1974 and it was planned for April 25, 19 days after Eurovision. Otelo arranged for his namesake’s song to be played on radio by 11pm the night before as a signal to his accomplices that it was game on. At 10.55pm, after a Suzi Quatro song, Paulo de Carvalho’s colourless tune was played across Lisbon. He sang: “I wanted to know who I was, what I’m doing here … You came as a flower that I have picked.”

Otelo’s co-conspirators collected their guns and made their way to key parts of the capital. Before dawn tanks were in the heart of Lisbon and the rebels had control of radio and television stations, the Bank of Portugal and the airport, and had taken possession of the Salazar Bridge, the Golden Gate look­alike that skips across the Tagus River that divides the hilly capital. In spontaneous support of the revolt, locals removed the brass letters of Salazar’s name and spray painted “April 25” instead.

Celeste Caeiro was a 40-year-old restaurant worker who, to celebrate the second anniversary of her cafeteria, went to the market and bought red and white carnations, then in season, to give to patrons. Instead she handed them to the mutinous soldiers, the first of whom placed the flower in his rifle barrel, an act copied across the city. The rebels appealed for civilians to remain indoors, but they took to the streets to celebrate. And so was born the Carnation Revolution.

It was almost bloodless, but the secret police shot dead four young men outside their headquarters. One of their number was shot and killed when he came out with his hands up.

The transition of Portugal to democracy was brief, but messy. Many considered Otelo an unpredictable radical. Nonetheless, he was placed in charge of the force that kept the peace in Lisbon and beyond. In March 1975 there was a failed right-wing coup, and in November that year Otelo – who had been to Havana and chummed up with Fidel Castro – was part of a left-wing assault on the fragile government. It failed and he was jailed, but for just three months. He was later invited to return to the army.

As Portugal grew into a multi-party democracy, Otelo stuck to his guns on the far left and in 1984 he was charged, tried, convicted of being part of a terror organisation and jailed again. He would later be pardoned. While imprisoned he found friendship with a divorcee who worked at the jail. On leaving, Otelo established a curious three-way relationship where, his biographer wrote, he divided his time between wife Dina and prison worker Filomena. The author recorded that “A habit was created, and then the habit was made system: from Monday to Thursday Otelo lived with Filomena, from Friday to Sunday with Dina”.

Nonetheless, each year as Portugal celebrated April 25 – the birthday of the modern nation – Otelo would be with Dina. Otelo helped change his country, but seemed unable to change himself.