Solidarity and resistance. This is the only way they could survive Tarrafal – News

Entering the concentration camp of the Portuguese dictatorship brings “bad memories” to Gil Varela, at the age of 89, imprisoned there for having fought for the freedom and independence of Cape Verde.

“Good memories were when we left here and saw a new country grow”, adds António Pedro da Rosa, 75 years old, another political prisoner, who stayed until the day of his release, on May 1, 1974.

“We were in the cell when we heard joy, a lot of people shouting that they were coming to free the prisoners, a lot of people with cars to take us to Praia”, the capital city, he recalls.

The prisoners participated in several popular rallies, before being taken to their respective homes, where their wives and children had been waiting for too long.

The solidarity between the prisoners still stands out today from the testimonies of Gil and António, who with Lusa toured the camp – today the Resistance Museum -, talking about the most vivid memories, among all those that have been published on paper and on the Internet.

Gil Varela, “Kid”, was held in preventive detention during 1970, in a group thrown into disciplinary cells, so dark that he even complained to the director, the Cape Verdean colonial official Eduardo Fontes: “He said the dark was good for the view” and that he wanted to “re-educate” them.

They only spent half an hour outside the cell in the morning, another half an hour in the afternoon and when night fell what they felt most of all, on the outside, was heat, an unbearable heat, on the inside “it was revolt”, says Gil.

“We were there for reintegration into society”, not the dreamed one, but the imposed one, “the best for the overseas provinces”, without freedoms, recalls Luís Fonseca, former Cape Verdean ambassador, executive secretary of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries ( CPLP) between 2004 and 2008, who will speak as spokesperson for political prisoners at the ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Tarrafal next Wednesday.

“We had committed a serious crime of treason against the country” by supporting different “terrorist” activities of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) and the destination was “a space with the minimum to survive”.

After being attacked by PIDE in other dungeons, Luis Fonseca was part of the first group of Cape Verdean political prisoners to arrive at Tarrafal (1970-1973) and which was organized to support the studies of new prisoners, such as António da Rosa, who on several occasions refers to the space as “school”.

It was this first group that supported and helped to endure the Tarrafal, describes António, one of those detained in the Pérola do Oceano case, the boat that they tried to divert to the west African coast where the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) was located. .

Gil Varela, who would be exonerated due to lack of evidence after being imprisoned in Tarrafal, remembers the conversations and interaction with the other prisoners as a kind of lifeline, the real “food” that kept him alive.

Today, the stage for this camaraderie, the Cape Verdeans’ common cell, is one of the rooms of the Resistance Museum with panels that tell the story, with a film on a screen and photos of prisoners, like them, isolated from the world.

“Once we refused to eat a meal” with spoiled food, a refusal that was more of a sign of unity, but which was worth the “punishment” of a month without visitors, recalls António.

But the most feared punishment, Holandinha, a tiny cell, with no space to lie down, no height to stand, only with bread and water, a can for necessities and tiny bars to let air through — heir to the ‘frying pan’, cell in the first phase of the camp, cruelly exposed to the sun.

Gil and António never ended up there, but they saw other prisoners there punished when the authority thought it was being challenged, which could happen even unintentionally.

A guard once pointed a gun at António da Rosa, on an occasion when he inadvertently approached a guardhouse during a walk.

“I went to my colleagues, told them and they all left. We went back to the same place together to see if he did the same thing, but he turned his back on us”, a moment etched in António’s memory, because “it was a demonstration that no one was afraid”.

Cape Verdean prisoners could not be together with Angolans, but they could see each other from afar and with their fingers they would make “the V for victory” or whistle revolution melodies, without the guards noticing, but which were signs of hope in the struggle that was taking place. to be stopped.

The presidents of Cape Verde, José Maria Neves, Angola, João Lourenço, Guinea-Bissau, Umaro Sissoco Embaló, and Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, the four countries of origin of the prisoners, celebrate on Wednesday, May 1st, the 50 years since the liberation of Tarrafal — a memorial plaque at the site marks the names of the 36 killed in the concentration camp by the Portuguese colonial dictatorship.

The majority, 32 dead, were Portuguese who challenged the fascist regime, imprisoned in the first phase of the camp, between 1936 and 1956.

The camp reopened in 1962 to incarcerate anti-colonialists from Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde — two Angolans and two Guineans died.

In total, more than 500 people were imprisoned in the “slow death camp”, a symbol of the violence and oppression of the colonial regime that fell on April 25, 1974.