THE REASON
The Portuguese are by nature fair-minded of their things, what is equal to say that despise their true culture for they delight themselves with that they import from abroad and is several times of awful quality.
Then, we have a restricted sense about life, and that ends by suffocating the creative spirit, the inspiration and the taste.
How many Portuguese did always act for own initiative, without pieces of advice nor helps of anybody, only steered by their own sensibility, aesthetic sense and love to the place where they were born and is it matchlessly committedly beloved?
It was thinking about you that read me and badly know me that I wrote and I accepted one day to be a Deputy. Of the hundreds written chronicles I compiled some, and of the parliamentary interventions the most noteworthy moments.
In my conscience it doesn't weighs me the fight in behalf of those that fewer know how to defend themselves. It weighs me surely the mistakes I committed and that I will try till the end of my life to compensate.
While I don't get it, I’ll write always whatever the life has been teaching me.
I hope my experience is of some usefulness for them.
THE WRITER IS AN IMPERSONATOR OF GOD
A happy form of using the existence is without a doubt the writing. The world of the letters, the priesthood of the word always put more to the service of the others than to the author's service.
The writer is, usually, a sacrificed that works for the men of his generation and, a lot of times, for the further generations getting the fame from what himself doesn’t take any advantage.
I point out to Camões (1), today humanity’s patrimony poet we celebrate on June 10 as a symbol of this prized Homeland that we love so much. Very well Camões starved after a creation life.
In spite of everything we exhort the youth to look at the literary practice as one of the most interesting expressions of human activity and one of those that gives the man a larger accomplishment.
Apart from rare exceptions never the profession of the letters was prosperous, however the truth is that the men fabulously rich of the age of Camões, of Camilo (2) or of Fernando Pessoa (3) nobody remembers. The writer, unaffectedly, will live forever in his work and readers.
The writer creates a world that gratifies him. He forges the people that he would like existed. He is, somehow, an impersonator of God.
WOE TO THE VANQUISHED
On March 18, in the newspaper “O DIA” ("THE DAY"), in the first page comes out a script of José Sampaio against Marcelo Caetano (4).
An unfair combat, nine assaults against somebody not present, the fencing of the past, the indifference of the present, to alienate the future.
After 50 years of political life, of extraordinary heavy presence in the Government of a Nation, Professor Marcello Caetano is accused and attacked as if he had been a minister weekend, as if he had the absolute power and if he had thrown it in the nettles, as if he had embodied the own God without getting the miracle of transforming the stones in bread and the Country in a paradise.
On few sides we waited for such hurried analysis to a Man and a time, as this one of José Sampaio and of the newspaper “O DIA” ("THE DAY").
Indeed, history needs of the coldness of the time, of the calm, of the vitality, of the weighing up of those who will come later. Intervening politically, that is to do politics; it seems to be the man's vocation before his own time leaving the task of the judgement and conclusion to those who will come next.
Mr. Sampaio is small and scanty to know whether the men who encircled Marcello Caetano were very good or very bad. Whether Mr. Sampaio wants to show himself to the eyes of the Revolution as a revolutionary he will thank Marcello Caetano for the own revolution without whom, as he says, the regime would continue.
It impresses the tear in the eyes of the dying lion unable of making use of the claws, formerly potent, to move away the sheep-dogs that are barking him closely.
Marcello Caetano, with all the human being's sins, was in this country of the stature that Sampaios will never have.
Sampaio, Sampaio, who are you?
NOTE: This article motivated varied correspondence, with Professor Marcelo Caetano, being the book published with the two letters, but that here will only appear in press letter.
Rio 30.III.78
Mr. Dr. Cunha Simões
I believe that it is the first time, since the April 25, that a newspaper has courage of boarding my defence against offences inflated over my name or my work by any rudimentary writer.
For that reason, I want to tell you how I am thankful to the newspaper “The Province", admiring the audacity, the independence and exemption they proof. Let's hope the public recognizes what exists of valuable in those attributes and correspond with his support.
With all the consideration I sign myself.
Yours faithfully
Marcelo Caetano
Mr. Dr. Cunha Simões
I received your letter of October 24 that didn't surprise me because there is plenty of time, for the Press and through our common friend Maria José Folque, I have been appreciating the lucidity of your intelligence and exceptional moral bravery. It is an amazing page with a precious testimony that I thank you very much. Not always in agreement with the judgements there formulated (although broadly open to the thought of my time, should I be considered a "foreign-like?) those who concern me, however, it doesn't compete me to discuss them, as nobody is good judge into his own cause. Only an answer I want give to the question that, at a certain point you do. What reason did seized me to accept in September 1968 the Government's responsibility, after telling my friends and the State’s Boss himself “that I didn’t have with me any solution for none of the pressing national problems?" The real truth is that starting from Dr. Salazar disease, my friends' pressures and even strangers’ that came close as restless patriots were very considerable: "if you’ll be invited, please, don't say no...” And the President of the Republic himself, when formulating me the invitation has informed me: I have heard more than 40 people, among civil and military, and 99% put his name forwards... Then, after so many years of public life, I felt the feeling that refusing to render a service that the Homeland demanded me in a critical moment, it would be cowardice, And I said yes, with the death in the soul. And furthermore I must say I didn't count upon the popular reception that I had. Also to the intimate I told in confidence my conviction that I was going to travel over the way of the cross, that the time had passed from the great support manifestations to the Government and of the affectionate applauses to whom exercise it... and in the first times the closer collaborators only got pessimistic information and unpleasant winds of the public opinion. It was when I decided to put them all on the shelf to low hands on the TV, inaugurating the "conversations in family" and creating through them a bond direct and personal with the people.
In my dislocations to the province, soon after, I felt the impact of that communication: the people came to the highway to see closely that one who knew the image (as if I was an actor, and cried out "look, he exactly as in television!"). It was that that allowed me to endure five and a half years the regime and to do an effort to save what possible, in the middle of the politicians' blindness, of the refusal of the opponents' collaboration or of the reticent ones, of the capitalists' selfishness, of the stupidity of the high bourgeoisie, of the irresponsible intellectuals' illusions, of the manoeuvre of the concerned Church in not losing some coming convoy and concerned about the overseas problem that in the country the right refused to understand in the only possible way and that the UNO didn't let solve it the only way that would be acceptable for Portugal.
To write more books? I don't feel with patience for it. It is enough yet what I am forced me to say at defending myself...
I know that your wife is my schoolmate's daughter Fernando Corte Real: I ask you to please transmit her respects.
Believe me, very thankful.
Marcello Caetano
INGRATITUDE
If somebody wanted to detach an important class in the Portuguese society he could with benefit make use of the ingrate’s illustration.
Flatterer, servile, ready for everything while he needs, he recognizes in the person of his protector the supreme master.
As who guesses the close upcoming future exaggerates his performance implying well that his feelings cannot last. Once outstripped the need, and satisfied the desire, the ingrate rejects his protector as something troublesome and unnecessary.
Everything deteriorates if that who did the favour finds himself in a hole or needs a friend hand.
The ingrate, as sub humanity's product, is shown unable to help that who helped out him, demonstrating this way he doesn’t understand this world of Christ nor can accept it as his own thing. Unhappily, this attitude is from now and always.
Without speaking in Judas, that betrayed HIM, let us invoke Pedro's illustration that denied three times his master for cowardice
They are like this the relationships among people.
Little more there is to wait of a world where the human relations impoverish from day to day.
THE HUMILITY OF SERVING THE NEIGHBOR
In this country to the edge sea planted, a newspaper would reflect the forces and the weaknesses of the People that it serves and of the area that defends, now before the political centralization and the wild exploration of the whole Portuguese province on the part of Lisbon, it is necessary that the province newspapers strengthen more and more.
Actually we must remember that Lisbon consumes 90 percent of the taxes collected in the province and on behalf of a political group that was stipulated to call Government of Portugal, but that maintains us in the deepest delay in the areas of Europe.
Only the newspapers will get to motivate and make aware all the Portuguese for the task that all have to do in common without for that we have to privilege some areas in disfavour of others but so that that happens it is necessary that the journalists know how to translate in their newspapers the reality that surrounds them.
To do newspapers carelessly it is self-defeating, accordingly it is necessary that the province ones make arrangements so that in these organs of information they are going getting ready people that can work in full time in such a way to lend them the whole force and coordination.
We have to think that to drive a newspaper is an art that needs somebody that forms an alliance with the literary and cultural quality, a sociological vision of his time, being devoted, entirely, to their fellow citizens, fundamental interests and the humility of serving the neighbour.
The sharp tongue in Portugal is the only institution that works.
Never anybody tried to do at this Country no matter which that didn't lift right away a muddy wave of mordacity.
Through that world of Christ, one lets govern who governs and to work who works. In Portugal that goal still was not gotten. Actually, when it is necessary, but only when it is necessary is used the critic intelligent, serious and frontal.
In Portugal be that as it may the service to render or rendered, one insults, fawns upon, libels. It is the answer of the incompetence in a country where many don't want to work and many others don't know how to work.
The Government will have two roads: the road of the past, via Salazar, forcing to clampdown, to shut the imbecile the mouth.
The other solution is in at one ear and out of the other to whom doesn’t deserve any attention nor order.
Be that as it may the strategy of the smear one must continue the road of the decisions, of the reconstruction, of the indispensable national revival to such a country where all want to be found of living. One lacks to let the other feel free, masters of their initiative, of their imagination, of their activity within their jobs, not disabling with small displeasures the men that can and should transform Portugal.
This doesn’t mean naturally to abolish the critic or that she has to be benevolent or inoperative.
This doesn’t mean to slacken the holy war to the traitors of the Homeland and those who sell the country everyday.
This doesn’t mean that we cannot use the utmost severity before the pseudo democratic and the political cheaters that use the naïve freedom of the democracies in order to annihilating without pity nor mercy and for ever and ever.
IN THE COUNTRY OF THE IMPROVISATION
The improvisation is for the Portuguese fatal as the destiny.
The Portuguese improvisation has centuries and marks the big and the most terrible moments that it was given to us to live as Nation.
Both in the peace and in the war we never got ready, we always preferred set in motion swiftly and in force. And the flaw is even of this or of that faction of Portuguese, it came from the boundaries of the monarchy, entered through the Republic, endured in the long Salazar’s age, keeps on holding up within the democracy.
Each Finance minister improvises a system, each work minister has a strategy, each Sports State Secretary has a very own and very personal purpose.
Nothing has been thought with time, consequently.
It happens, now and again that it is won at the general office the championship that got lost in the field and all are remembered that, before beginning the World Soccer’s championship, the federal leaders blessed the Falklands’ crisis they thought to move away England from the World championship to give place to us, exemplary eliminated in the sport fields , and the most curious in this all, is that nor would admire us a lot that if there we went ended for winning the World championship due to that unruly fury that has coming cutting, in this country the saints and the heroes.
“Pitiable fate, strange condition" as the poet would say in the expression that best characterizes this people, to whom somebody called for some special reason "vandals of Europe", that surprisingly live in the land of the best wine of the world, they have 80% of the sun of the planet and they are in their unconsciousness and in their surprise, happy like children.
Although it seems a lie is in this Country, that some call underdeveloped and others of country of the improvisation, that the technocrats from all over the world come to spend vacation in order to learn how to live as men and to enjoy, in pleasure and friendship, the conviviality of a people that knows how to savour the life yet.
WE ARE POOR BECAUSE WE WANT
A Country with the climate that we have, situated in Europe is poor only because it wants.
It would be enough to organize only and fully as country of Tourism and all would live well and pleasingly, being still extraordinarily useful for the people of the whole world when providing them the rest to what all are entitled.
We prefer however to mine the potentialities of this Country with thousands of workers that don't work or work badly and hundred of public companies that don't do more than to paying withdrawn wages of the contributions of all of us, even of the poorest.
Actually, we are poor only for not being the slightest expert to reflect over removing from this Country whatever God wanted to give us effortless and we insist in not wanting to take advantage.
Against this... we can’t only blame the Government. Everybody, but everybody is to blame.
THE PRIVILEGED CONTACT WITH THE NATURE
Our Country can stand for the European the oasis, the terrestrial paradise, the privileged contact with the nature.
Actually, maybe it is not the technological society, the ideal group to live; maybe it is not the society of the great factories the best choice in order to pass the few years of existence in this world. Therefore, it is probable that developed Europe can benefit of the "delay" of Portugal, up to now protected from the technological assault and the industrial wear and tear.
For an inexplicable miracle we got to preserve the gastronomy, the craft, and the folklore and mainly to safeguard the purity of this cosy, hospitable and friend people.
It is this contribute that we are going to give to Europe.
We didn't compete with operas, nor theatres, nor movies, but I bet that the group of Miranda's Pauliteiros (5), Fandango of Ribatejo (8), the Portuguese Bullfight, the hunt to the fox, the Portuguese horse, our wine, our liquor, the alheiras (6) of Mirandela and above all the cheese of the mountain that is, unquestionably, the best cheese of the world, will do success.
This small list is really the great change coin that will show the CEE that made the best business of its life when welcoming Portugal.
We are quite sure that Europe of the progress, of the prosperity and of the hard work and organized will never repent of having received this wonderful Country where the time runs smoothly and has the true palate of its life.
The paradise is in front of Europe doors and has the dearest name: Portugal.
TO ORGANIZE THE PLEASURE OF THE OTHERS
The United States of Europe are coming and with bigger or smaller will we embark on the little possibility of conserving absolute independences, that is: to have the door closed and the key in the pocket.
So, almost certainly, the countries will distribute tasks amongst themselves to accomplish advising priorities, in this or that sector, and distributing privileges according to the execution of these tasks.
This way, who has characteristics for the Agriculture will do this or that species of Agriculture. Who has characteristics for the industry and mainly who has industrial characteristics and advanced technology will intensify that branch for the benefit of all.
And what about us?
Poor in what concerns agriculture, reduced industrially almost to zero, will it be possible to be reserved for the free times selling to the others the treasure it is our sun, or our temperature and our people's sympathy?
Will it be possible that, our Country’s Tourism industrialist, transfer this second national activity for number one and subsequently to exclusive activity or almost exclusive?
And why not?
To organize work, that is, in this case, to organize the rest, it is to contribute so that our activity is more profitable and more lucrative.
In a work Europe, it is not shame for anybody, to transform Portugal in a true paradise, where the sojourns will be true cures for the body and the mind.
That is not to say, that we don’t work and we don’t do it seriously. What is urgent is to well organize the pleasure of the other, preparing Portugal as a true country of Tourism where the pure air, the crystalline waters of our sources and streams, the neatness of our beaches and streets be a fact strong enough to attract millions of other European, in whose countries is already difficult to breathe the decontaminated air that is still offered them and that we will have to preserve if we want to continue independent, rich, prosperous and... healthy.
THE GIFT WITH WHAT WE ENTERED THE CEE
When it is spoken about Portugal in CEE we broach always the matter as it would be if united Europe didn't was more than a marriage of convenience in order to get more money.
Whether one of the advantages of the union of the Europe countries is the profitable advantage, in our judgement it won't be the most important and much less the only.
Necessarily the youths of these twelve nations have a very larger space now. Europe not being a homeland is a wide field of friendship, culture and experiencing. And maybe lives this fraternal community's great conquest here that turns us more and more citizens of the world.
It is plausible that the young Community feels enormous difficulties in its organization and in its day by day as it is a total novelty in relation to the future and fight with forces of the past, old of many centuries and of tough remodelling.
I hope EC doesn't lose the courage and be an irreversible act in relation to the United European States, indispensable to the balance of the forces that nowadays dominate the world.
But whether for Portugal the great advantage of the union will reside in its economic evolution, Europe will also be able to draw advantage from the experience, of the natural quality and of the skill of the new world that integrates her.
In what consists the gift then with what we entered CEE?
Essentially, it consists of an almost millennial culture, deeply original and ignored from the Europeans.
As it is evident we suffered along all these centuries some influence from Europe and, surprisingly, it is that facet that our official entities want to show whenever we are visited by foreigners.
They commonly hide, as slighter act of culture, an amazing craft, a very wealthy and varied gastronomy, a miscellaneous and good-looking folklore that emphasizes the people's presence from everywhere.
To join this, a climate, a landscape and a very charming people.
Europe received a no polluted partner, expert in the adventures of the world and receptive to innovations. The changes will be from equal to equal, although naively, many think that the Portuguese were beneficiaries.
There is who thinks the opposite and it is for that that the world proceeds it’s own way.
PORTUGAL CAN BE THE STRONGEST AND TEMPTING COUNTRY
In relation to the European countries more industrialized we are behindhand, what doesn't meant that our situation is not, on account of that, more comfortable and more able of projecting ourselves in a future, probably of better quality than that which have our partners of CEE.
These countries have sacrificed to the progress very important aspects like the environment, for the stress, for aggressions to the nature and yet for serious attacks against the human condition, what already have unchained an accelerated process of suicide, a run on drugs and consequently a run on the psychiatrists.
Our CEE partners live better, but more and more with less interest and happiness.
Of course, we cannot live the adventure of the rich countries, but, if on the one hand we grow to be poorer in currency, we become on the other hand richer in opportunities in what concerns to preserving the environment where life can increase harmoniously, and where it will be possible to refrain other men of industrialized countries under an unbearable pressure in view of the fact that they lead an intolerable rhythm of work, furthermore because of the environment and the neighbouring.
Portugal, instead of the weakest of the industrialized countries, it can be the strongest tourist country in Europe.
REFUGE AND BLESSED LAND
Unlike Europe of the production, the factories and the debris, Portugal can yearn to be Europe of the vacations, of the pleasure and of the rest.
Happily, far away from the climate of wars, we got till now to be in this continent, refuge and blessed peace land. And although it is not possible to live without polluting the truth is that fortuitously and because of our ancestral backwardness we came across today for Portugal the ecological solution as our sole exit point.
In this Country, time runs slowly, ignoring the fury of the hours, and enjoying the leisure of the centuries. Let us offer upon that hurried Europe and already with atherosclerosis symptoms, the vigour of a new Country that came back from Africa with redoubled forces and which has to offer the peace, the safety, the well-being and the pure air that one breathes from Minho (7) to Algarve and where the palate of the Wine from Ribatejo (8) or of the olive oil from Beira Alta (9) are the god man's that every time will pay more to live at this Country to the seashore planted, but whose price will be, obviously compensatory.
Portugal, Country of vacations, is that a good reason to enter through the big door in CEE.
IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO DO LAWS
To live currently in society is something of complex and difficult.
Life has already told us that nowadays the illiterate is an authentic blind lost in a maze. We need to know our rights and our duties concretely.
We need to have easy access to our privileges.
We need, in short, campaigns that alphabetize us socially.
It is not enough to do laws. It is necessary to publish them all the time, never getting tired because everyday there are new citizens that arrive to life.
Democracy is precisely this: to value the people, turning them more integrated in the society in that they live.
Concomitantly to this it is necessary to convince the public officers that they are to the service of the people and that it is the people who pay them.
Everywhere there are public department’s employees extremely loved and respected and others deeply hated and despised.
It is necessary, also here, to prepare those who assist the public so that it can be made with love, dedication and efficiency.
A COUNTRY CANNOT BE GOVERNED AT RANDOM
Entering impetuously in this Europe where the progress and the democracy are one’s own master for decades, Portugal shivers every day that flies away and plunge clumsily in games of which it badly knows the rules.
Actually, our inaptness compels the politicians and the politic we are following degrade it quickly. This degradation is so alarming that can turn to cost us our own survival.
As a matter of course, in Portugal, we have confused the term democratize, with degrading and that is in such a way serious that the disbelief and the indifference are going settling comfortably inside the Portuguese society that can bring it in one or two years bitter consequences. (Think over the homecomings from Angola and Mozambique and in the massacres practiced in Timor).
If on the one hand we intend to imitate the countries where the welfare is evident and the democratic institutions work, on the other hand we forgot that a country cannot be governed inconsiderately and we must, if we want to survive, to imitate them the public organisms that are steadily also given to professional technicians and to efficient politicians who assure in any circumstance the maintenance of the State machine avoiding, this way, dramatic and irreversible situations.
Portugal needs to find, urgently, a new team, dynamics, worthy and competent for drawing national recovery main lines that gets us to endure as independent country.
We have to release infantilisms and purposeless quarrels. We have to maintain firmness in the fair and wise decisions, and it is preferable to hear the shouting of the opponents that still get to eat regularly, than the deaf cry of the starving ones that dying through the cottages or the corners will accuse us of pusillanimous, of unconsciousness and of fearful.
PORTUGAL HAS NEVER ORGANIZED AT LEVEL OF WORK
In Portugal one lives a very old and very curious phenomenon. One emigrates because the country, never having organized at level of the work, presents a reduced number of workstations and those, badly remunerated.
We are even convinced that the Discoveries resulted from a state of affairs of emigration.
On the other hand we can say that we have organized well economically because we preferred to emigrate.
How will the future be?
For the time being we entered the CEE and the first collision seems us positive, on the other hand the crude crisis went by, however, and for paradoxical that this seems, we are convinced that a new time of very intense emigration is approaching and this for two reasons: it will be necessary again the labour-marketing in the countries of CEE and, in the medium term, the Portuguese will be requested to work in Angola and Mozambique resulting consequently a deep exodus of the Portuguese population that can reach the end of the century with less than eight million inhabitants.
Or then, more earnest yet, we will be emigrant in our own country, as individually or in groups, the foreign enterprises are going invading Portugal and suddenly, without we well know how, it is everybody working for foreign boss in Portuguese land.
But it will be exactly so our destiny? To sell the soul, the joy and Portugal in return of some miserable centimes or then will it be that the Portuguese, conscious of their worth, using their wits fully will join and do believe, finally, they can build in the homeland their dream place that they always conceive of for themselves and for their children's happiness?
THE FARMERS
Explored since ancestral times the farmers are going abandoning it with bitterness and disillusion owing to not only to the wild raising of the prices of the fertilizers, of the diesel oil, of the seeds, but also for the contempt with that they are treated.
Gil Vicente (10) put in a farmer's mouth the famous definition: "we are the people's life and death of our lives."
As there are 500 years the farming is still in Portugal the spiritual death of the condemned man to the heavy work, enduring and simple, to the illiteracy, to the lonely life, to the absence of services of health.
The disorder of our agriculture forces to the disorder in the man's fields life.
Therefore and very obviously this old-fashioned agriculture that is practiced in our Country doesn't interest anybody, it doesn't serve anybody, forcing more and more to the fields deserting and doing that they contribute less and less to our well-being and for a feeding that comes for the Portuguese of the Portuguese land.
We have to face the agricultural life as a work as the one of a bank, of a hospital, of a general office or of a school.
Like this is done, there is already a long time ago, in France and in England. If we don't do alike we will never reach the developed world where the well-being and the social security are the root of the happiness of the people that there inhabit.
WE DEFEND WITH THE EMIGRATION AND THE TOURISM
Portugal has never been well ruled. Only so one can understand that we have arrived at the end of the 20th century with a medieval agriculture, an incipient industry and trade, without navy, without aviation and with an useless and obsolete army.
We defend ourselves with the emigration and with the tourism.
Our history points out indeed two or three kingdoms and two or three isolated statesmen that left the stagnation without their work had had continuity.
The problem carries on in our days when the great political and social flaw continues to be the way of the companies and in last analysis the trend of the Country.
Indeed we never knew how to do anything regularly.
Now and then it falls to lay hands on an India or a Brazil which we ended for losing without glory or advantage and we don't see way of modifying this situation that becomes more and more worse, making impossible the so much spoken modernization.
We are again in a serious attempt of being in step with Europe that ended for receiving us in the Economic Community.
It is an attempt where we have to put all our hope, although the delay that separates us from the rich countries of Europe, now our partners, is very big.
We cannot forget that, officially we still have 20% of illiterates and 70% of semi-literate persons that practically don’t read or write nothing after the basic study.
This doesn't mean that the Portuguese are skilled, disciplined, fulfiller and honest.
Before the challenge that the Europe, the progress and of the well-being it proposes us, we will catch with both hands the new situation and apply at our country the merits that the other ones recognize us and that already have demonstrate, definitely, out of the country.
THE PORTUGUESE EMIGRATES BECAUSE HE FEELS PRISONER IN HIS OWN LAND
Emigration in Portugal is as old as the history and it is owing fundamentally to our mission of travelling.
By Spain, tightened in this corner of the Peninsula, it is natural that the Portuguese feels prisoner in his own land. Fascinated by the sea and obviously for the navigation, early bear out that to travel was a fabulous and lucrative adventure.
Therefore, we started in with the emigration, travelling through the world, to live together with people of all races, competent to work in any part and to do almost everything and almost always well done.
Who first emigrates are the Portuguese of Ribatejo (8) and south of Portugal. The North is farming people, more in love with his strip.
These only decided on mass departure last century, impelled by the economic gloominess and they chose Brazil.
The houses of the Brazilians of Minho (7) are Well known, that went off poor and they arrived rich to achieve great marriages and to take a well-heeled life.
But unlike of what many people say, we did not move abroad merely for economic reasons.
Be that as it may our situation we must always live elsewhere, to travel on account of our unquenchable curiosity of visiting other lands and other folks.
In spite of everything, and as good Portuguese that we are, we never forgot the holy land, always hoping to return to her even for the particular reason of finishing there their days.
Impassioned by our land we rejoice with the suffering of being far away from her and of coming here, from time to time, to kill longings of our landscape, of our food, of our wine and principally of hearing to speak our people.
The truth is that nobody is thoroughly emigrant. It can be said that many Portuguese, in any period of his life, do emigration.
To emigrate or not to emigrate is a phenomenon as to travel or not and it is good that one knows that we are all Portuguese and we didn't never become separated in emigrants and no emigrants.
To foment this kind of genre is disadvantageous and little earnest.
We all are brood of a same Country that we loved above our own life, and, living in Portugal or thousands of kilometres away, we all feel pride in being Portuguese.
THE HOUSES OF THE EMIGRANT
Some communication organs have criticised with some ingenuousness and speckled with boorish traditionalism, the houses that the emigrants build up in Portugal, making them responsible for all the urbanistic town deficiencies that have worried this Country in the earlier years.
Although I am not apologist of the systematic town planning depersonalization, I believe that in a country as ours, strongly beaten by the winds of history is at least, senseless, to lock the influence of this or that country, in this or in any other time.
If we think out a little we’ll recollect at once the "Brazilians’" emigrants one hundred year-old houses that are today national monuments.
Actually, it is ridiculous that one defends that the Portuguese have to do the houses always in the same way.
It is owing to similar cases that our architecture is today an aberration and what exists in our country is from the authorship of foreign architects or of learned amateurs.
Nobody can, for a good-sense subject, to ignore that the peoples are entitled to innovating, of doing how they want and they would like, even if that offends the Old of Restelo (12).
Let us not exaggerate our proverbial obtuseness and let the emigrants alone.
In point of fact, it doesn't offend us the taste and the distant influences of the emigrants' houses, it offends us the sensibility of some that don't do nor they let to do.
THE FATE OF A PEOPLE
I have been reached for hundreds of letters in order to attack the decolonization and to defend the past.
Many carry on insisting in order I did it.
What is done, bad or good, it is already gone astray.
Let us be down-to-earth. Let us put an end to resentment.
I deem they are long-lasting.
We must find our identity right away, to forget the old hostilities and to pluck out from our intelligence the happiness that the wrath and the jealousy move away hopelessly from us.
Altogether we should understand that Portugal when integrating the European Union didn't enter Europe, but it returned to Europe after a walk of half a millennium through that world of Christ where we has been missionaries, civilizers, pirates, culture hauliers, adventurers, as it competes to a noble and worthy people.
Embargoed its only border neighbour of enlarging their horizons in that direction, the Portuguese have turned with determination for the sea, they should sail and travel.
We came back bringing in the luggage a little of each people and of each region.
Long before we have begun, in the 15th century, the great adventure of the Discoveries, we have been integrated from the most remote ages, by peoples of different lands that moved to the Iberian Peninsula and they remained in the territory that today constitute Portugal, for it was the only remaining before the sea.
As regards the natives called Iberians we don’t know very much, but it is well known the history of the Celtic, the Phoenicians, Greeks, Vandals, Suebi, Alani, Visigoths, Muslims and Romans that settled hear as military tourist walking, having mixed with the local populations and generated the wayfarer people that is ours.
Just as them we came back to the source place.
It is obvious that it would be broad nastiness from us to join the honest Deputies' signatories of the protest against Argentina with the bomber culprits that burst petards to the door of that country Embassy.
It is manifest that it cannot exist, both physically and ideologically, comparisons. However, it is reasonable to underline that the international effect is very similar, maybe matching.
We know the people. They don’t. We know who are the Deputy Carlos Laje, José Leitão and Aarons de Carvalho. We know they struggled for the democracy, we see them put their responsibility in every act or situation, face to face against the anonymous and murderess bomb. But outside, in the world for which happen the demonstration and the bomb, the distinction is detail with no concern for the circumstance.
The Deputies, the demonstrations, the bombs, the riot are the ensemble that is not detailed beyond the border, which cannot be individualized in good or bad aims, independently of the bombs and the protests.
We pose the question: What can improve, in what concerns Argentina and the world, our noise, there in S. Bento (13), losing definitively the opportunity of dealing with urgent matters, sometimes dramatic, of the Portuguese that here beside us bear the hard life the country imposes them?
If the Medical Association deals with the land reform and the University of Sciences meets in plenary session for two days to set out the problem Lisnave or Setenave, and Setenave goes on strike for the sake of education, we protest and we will protest fiercely for meddling with competence alien areas. And when does the Assembly of the Republic wants to administer Argentina and Brazil? Do we laugh or we set boundary to vote against?
THE CRISIS OF HUMANISM
The big-heartedness that the humanism brought to the world struggles face-to-face with the conflicting philosophy of unexpected consequences: The banditry.
Believers in the man's rights, of any man that chooses the road of the justice and truth, the modern social organization will create into his breast the army of the evil, death and fear.
Against Aldo Moro has grown the satanic sword of the wicked, affecting deeply the holy beginning of the authority, the discipline, the respect for the human life, for the own human condition.
The munificence of the humanism generates the banditry.
More profitable and easier than assaulting banks is turning the assault to the power for what a small group is enough.
Against the terrorism, and up to the present moment, never the humanity answered with the terrorism itself, but I think it is time of rethinking this attitude.
Crimes of political terrorism are barely a police problem, but a crime against humanity, against each and every one and against our children's future.
Supporter of the peace, the love, the fraternity, I am also aligned with the ready and cruel answer for crimes of this nature.
THE GENERATION OF 80
The 70 19th century generation seems to implicate that the elitist group of our century is known as the generation of 80, as point out the democratic Conferences of the Maria Matos theatre that in lack of the Casino Lisbonense (15) intends prophesise about the politics of this country in the decade that gets ready to enter.
A Lisbon weekly publication, managed and elaborated by journalists, whose cultural top tallied with sifting through the Antero and Eça de Queirós’ (16) generation presents now Maria Matos' (17) conferences that are a revolutionary mimicry, domestic and advertising, without ungentlemanliness for the personalities who speak and for the matters they aim at.
Antero, Eça, Adolfo Coelho, Salomão Saraga (19), are not equivalent, the broader their good will could be, to Freitas do Amaral, Sousa Franco, Mário Soares, Álvaro Cunhal (20). These, the largest or smaller difference are Government of today, while Eça, Antero (16), and group was politically for the one of tomorrow.
Does the “Jornal” (21) cares for the political glory of nonsense? So it must yield its Maria Matos tribune to Isabel do Carmo (20) and the celebrated Carlos, to Arnaldo de Matos and Saldanha Sanches and not to Acácio (20) once he is moderate and affordable, only hence the Viscount de Jaime Gama de Ávila, would order the enclosure of the Casino Lisbonense, the Maria Matos and it would give origin to intellectual and political confusion in the Chiado (21) area.
The historical answers and the return to the democratic starting point are always decadence syntony and a new world dawn to the point of to beginning.
THE EIGHTIES AGAIN
Answer to a reader.
The Portuguese is naturally distrustful and charges, usually, who writes, with intentions that were never in his thought or imagination.
Only this explains a sharp lampoon page sent to us because of the "groundwork" of the last newspaper, which, if you are recalling it dealt with the Casino Lisbonense's (15) conferences, else, of Maria Matos that concluded as follows: "The historical replacements and the return to the democratic starting point are always decadence syntony and dawn of a ready new world to begin."
That was enough so that somebody had sent us, among other dalliances the following prose:
“It is natural that the feelings of freedom, which even so one breathes in this country, smother a lot of eager people for returning to the privileges of the past minding their back and filling their pockets.
The sauciness from those who point to decadence, past that are four democracy scarce years should not be unpunished in a society that is looking for defending from its enemies."
Going in false privileges, the filled pockets and other vulgarized commonplaces by a recognized Portuguese Party, I guess it’s important to explain two subjects that can have effective interests for whom has patience of reading us.
Actually, I think that the democracy and the Portuguese parliamentarianism of this century as we progressed in ideology, in methods and in social organization.
Comparing we can say that we stagnated entirely or even went slowed. However, there is no doubt that we continue politically romantic as a hundred years ago. We continue elitist, to historicise as there are a hundred years ago. And as a hundred years ago we continued to serving of the name of the People and ignoring completely we talk a lot about.
My dear and virulent opponent and my dear and my dear readers; the truth is that to think that there is in fact decadence is not a crime and it is even our conviction that is not a mistake.
The second topic we would like to remind to the dear epistolographist is that the decadence of a time and of a regime doesn't force to retreats or historical replacements.
We believed that the future of the world will bring us new and better solutions based in the lessons of the past and in the art of imagining the future.
The crisis that the country crosses is, as you want or not, eternal not fatal.
After this my dear Sir and esteemed Portuguese, because it is for all of you that I speak, it remains us the hope in the capacity we have disclosed, resisting to the worst moments of the history.
For more of eight centuries all has happen alike and all will continue for "secula seculorum."
THE WORLD WHERE WE LIVE
The world where we live is in its hole a badly arranged and a badly administrated house.
It is absolutely unbelievably that the budget of a Russian or American nuclear boat, go beyond the budget of fifty not aligned countries. On the other hand, the sharing out of the population is primarily anarchical being some countries as India where people gather to die of hunger and others like Canada, Australia or great regions of Africa where life doesn’t work for labour lack. It would compete to the United Nations concentrate over this problem seeking a better distribution of the people. Through the territories and a larger participation of there riches in the life of the poor. The earth could be a true paradise where there weren’t starving children and where one needs not to steel and to kill to eat.
It is imperative to have a lot of courage to work with love and devotion for this land which needs hard of the intelligence and force of everybody in order to continue worthy and a gentle place for the posterity.
HOW TO ABOLISH MISERY AND UNEMPLOYMENT
The outburst of idleness in the industrialized countries or even in development countries contrasts fiercely chiefly in Africa and any regions o Asia.
Naturally, these countries are living in the deepest misery for need of competent technicians that organize them to the soil and subsoil.
As it is obvious, all unemployed of the industrialized countries would be very worthwhile countries’ Industry and Agriculture launching that ordinarily hold profusely raw materials, favourable soils and climates.
On the other hand the rich countries spend billions of dollars in unemployment benefits solving badly a problem that could be extraordinarily well resolved if there who remain them over on aside and are necessary in the other were moved in perfect functionality.
Those who find this a fool and improper idea are part of that group that esteem that isn’t worthwhile to put up ones umbrella in order not to remain on a side and they make necessary in another where moved in perfect operativeness conditions.
The ones that find this crazy and improper idea do part of that group that thinks it is not worthwhile to open the hat-of-rain when only rains for not closing it when the rain puts up.
This would be the new crusade that would put an end to the hunger in the surface of the earth. Instead gives alms we should teach the poor to fish for livelihood.
MEN AND WOMEN OF CAPE VERDE
Cape Verde was born with me and has been following me with small breaks for the life as a dream that doesn’t keep out of the way and constantly returns to me. First my grandfather’s histories on Cape Verde and through São Tomé, places where had left his youth, later the Cape Verde of the elementary school with teacher José Manuel Landeiro compelling that nobody failed a single detail on those islands that in my imagination of restless child, in search of the world took as charmed islands.
Teacher Landeiro was little permissive with student’s dreams, and took the mistakes seriously and when I mixed the windward there with the leeward then came a pair of blows vivify the memory and to bring me to the real tangible facts of life.
It was spoken a lot about the banana, the coffee, the pineapple of Cape Verde and in Diogo Gomes e António de Nola. They taught me a thousand of details and they told me that sometimes the summertime was very lingering. Only of the people, of the men and of the women nothing was said, may be because it was not an examination question…and to me, only the people interested in detriment of the pineapples, the bananas and of Mr. admiral António de Nola. Moreover, it was that people that I found in a camp of the Portuguese Youth that take me, some years later to dedicate them two or three dozens of pages in a published book 16 or 17 years ago.
It is true that I published the romance without never have visited Cape Verde. It is today, after staying there, I check that this people have never deceived me. I always felt them as in reality they are.
In the trip of Parliamentary group, then I went to see the colour, the way, the workmanship and the form of the islands from what I had been told so much and of the people that I always had been hidden and that I, by chance, had found.
I visited Sal, Santiago and São Vicente. It was in Santiago, in Cidade da Praia and in the magnificent Tarrafal’s seaside resort where I made an appointment with the people of Cab Cape Cape o Verde.
The people of Cape Verde is harmony, rhythm, beauty, joviality, it is happiness of living. It would be said that God adjusted in the native of Cape Verde the reason that keeps out of the way and differentiates: the skin comes from Africa and Europe. The sweet eyes remind the people that navigate there out of the bottom of the Mediterranean.
One day, the woman from Cape Verde will characterise the world, as ideal pattern of feminine beauty.
The man is intelligent, open and always in search of the best solution to solve a problem that seems insoluble: the thought.
Between the African traditionalism and European modernity, Cape Verde can transform itself in a magnificence balance example with advantage for two continents that for centuries are looking for the type of relationships that best suits its purposes.
Only a last comment: life in Cape Verde seems to be in its first day of creation. In contrast with the other men’s decadence and others militant all this because here we found sublime men and women that were born happy, irradiate happiness in a rough, and hard land that denies them every day the crop that they have thrown to their soil.
TOURISM IN CAPE VERDE
The beautiful woman from Cape Verde, the lobster of the islands and the silky sand of those marvel beaches will end for doing, paradoxically, of dark Tarrafal a sweet stay of vacations.
Just as Madeira, Azores and Canaries, the islands of Cape Verde will only be able to be alternative poetic of the vacations, of the people of the North and of the work.
It is inevitable to transform Cape Verde in a second Acapulco.
If I governed, it should begin already tomorrow. Everything is beautiful and natural in these islands of the Atlantic Ocean. Everything is harmony beauty and heat. Everything is sympathy from the deep eyes to the inhabitants to the brunet healthy of the skin, to the sands and beaches equals to the sands and beaches Portugal, but a lot, much hotter.
It is the fire of Africa, the beauty of Africa, and it can be (and it will be with certainty) the comfort and the mentality of Europe.
In Tarrafal, in the beach of Tarrafal one serves today, shellfishes that are a godsend what for itself justifies a trip to São Tiago's island.
Men and women speak about Portuguese age, look at us and laugh as if everything was to be in a different way.
Maybe it is like this the spirit of Bissau, as the only obligation native was receiving well, and providing visitors with the delicacies of their election habitat. One day there will be turning Year feast in Cidade da Praia, with special flights and there will be hotels that will make remind a lot of ground and a lot of people. We are from those who are already returning from the flourishing Empire, in order to know better than nobody that must return to those islands where the thought and the heart get lost in the love to the ground and the people. Moreover, nobody, nobody whatever strong he should be, will flee to the destiny by God specified.
THE RAIN IN CAPE VERDE
Who sometime visited the arid island of Cape Verde stays before the anguish of the rain that the Creator seems to have denied, abusively, to that extraordinary people that I will never forget.
Only who knows Cape Verde can feel the simple newspaper news that inform about the fact seemingly simple, of the nature that finally pitied and after long years waiting to have decided for the water, that is miracle hereabouts in such distant lands.
I know that there are tears in the eyes of the Cape Verde’s inhabitants that look the beneficial rain that it falls over the stepmother‘s ground that denies them the sustenance in another way.
The aboriginals in his land, now independent, since the first moment that gets ready to receive the rain and to hold in mainland the precious liquid that hurries in the sea from the surroundings hillsides. The dikes that are built by the people, from sunrise to sunset, and kneads with the perspiration, are actually the foundations of the independence that it is wanted prosperous and happy.
The natives of Cape Verde, struggling so against the nature for the survival win the wonder of all the peoples of the World, generously forced to help who so worthily knows to struggle against the adversity.
That the men’s solidarity joins nature and that one-day is possible Cape Verde fresh and green where the happiness and the abundance can live in the house of each one.
MESSAGE TO AMÂNDIO CÉSAR
I don’t know him personally. I have been reading, as everyone, things of him from the most several times and on the most several subjects. You were for me a name in type of press to which we hardly ever tied a real person with own life in this valley of tears that we all, more or less sorely are crossing. I don’t know where he is at present, nor do I know what happened him after what came about at this Country lately. I suppose, however, that it is my duty to leave this message here with the simplicity with it was given to me.
The history is told in two words: having moved myself to Cape Verde with a writer of the land whose name was António Aurélio Conclaves. We talked and inevitable a lot about Cape Verde and those that has written on the mysterious islands of Atlantic Ocean. Aurélio Gonçalves refers Amândio César and to the critics he wrote about him as the highest moments of his writer’s life.
He ended up asking solidarity and charged me to transmit you his friendship above all if you are crossing a bad plight.
Here it is, Amândio César, an operate message that doesn’t forget his friends.
It is of these rare loyalty and dignity examples that will be made the history of the qualities of greatness and glory on which we pried ourselves and Portugal and the Portuguese, will never have to embarrass.
EXILED
The hard bread of the exile alternates with the Portuguese maize bread for mere nothings.
Intolerants and swaggerers, the half that governs the country always chased far away the other half that is usually in Paris, in London, Algiers or in São Paulo waiting for regime breakdown. It bursts the revolution, the exiled return, the residents go abroad, everything is as formally, with the difference that the people pay, exaggeratingly with hunger the transfers of their political elites through Europe. A few of them will be buried far away. It was like this with D. Miguel (33), with Afonso Costa (34), with Henrique Galvão (34), with Jorge de Sena (35).
For a lot of respect that deserves us the adventures of Portugal far and wide fled to the political fate and we won’t leave of underlining with certain fright that the natives always avoided the exile for distant lands of the East, changing the ideology, the Marxism and the Leninism for the comfort in America, for the sweet France, for the civilized England.
The Marxism was never our leftists’ bending to live, in preference it was it to write and to think. The practice, the day by day, the civilization wanted it always less to the left and more to the comfort, less to the sacrifice and the Bolshevism and more to the elitism and culture.
The capitalist societies seduce both the holders of the capital, and everyone that lives from its structure, of the renewed comfort in his imagination of every day. Jorge de Sena won’t be the last Portuguese to distribute with the strange land of the exile. Through the world die everyday unknown men that here were born and that far away went to look for the sustenance.
He Portuguese body and the Portuguese soul, for the world in pieces distributed.
IBERIAN FEDERATION
Homelands sellers auctioneered lately with the tired idea of the old Iberian – Federation.
Fundamentally they want everything less to be yoked, what means work unwillingness. To tie them to Spain would be to create some years more of confusion, forcing so that the sluggards dodged legitimately to the wok on behalf of the ideas.
Without need to appeal to great philosophies, it is enough to think at countries as Luxembourg, Monaco and Switzerland that, forgetting their reduced dimension, they exerted themselves working being scarified daily in order to get better, accomplishing exhaustively pre – established programs.
Off with Peninsulas’ scoundrels.
It is always preferable a small country, governed by earnest people and worthy work.
The peoples’ untrustworthy focus is not in the Government‘s palace, but in the cells of the penitentiary. Only starting from here it is possible start afresh Portugal.
We let sell gratuitous overseas provinces, we won’t let sell the land that is our cradle for 800 years.
REGIONALIZE WHAT?
Lacking other matters to our politicians, they spend their energies delineating the regionalization that each head is suggesting.
Actually, Portugal is a too small Country, of the size of a French province and with so many inhabitants as the area of Paris. On the other hand a country of semi-literate people, unqualified, with political class a lot of times wavering, and we risk provoking one more series of political abortions very expensive and useless. Regionalize this way is in itself negative, a superficial and authentic façade work.
It is not possible to regionalize if the services are inexistent, inoperative, or disjointed and I think paradoxical to suppose a success the Regional installation when the national one of those services failed in spite of all conditions to triumph. In addition, it will always fail while economical and social level of the populations we pretend that regionalize continue in a delay and in shameful lack of aptitude in comparison with the other countries in Europe.
According to my point of view to get throughout the regionalization without a deep pedagogy and without a school revolution, doesn’t have any political advantage, To lose time now with the angel’s sex is too dangerous for an old country of almost ten centuries.
UNEMPLOYMENT
Everywhere is spoken about idleness and in the impossibility of reversing this penchant, reaching several millions the number of unemployed in Europe.
The economists and the Governments are already serving themselves of unemployment as an inflection and prices destabilizing.
A good lot of unemployed is a warranty for some systems.
Some time ago came up in Lisbon a theorizer that foresaw the hypothesis of stabilizing the Job market expelling the emigrants, falling back upon the underemployment or prohibiting the woman of working.
The solutions seem to me sad and unworthy of a theatrical and serious one of these fundamental subjects for the humanity’s peace.
Will it be that our civilization we call Christian and western, won’t be capable to solve this subject giving to all the possibly to winning decent and legitimacy our livelihood?
It seems me that. One of the measures that could enlarge the substantially search concerning the offer in the employment world was to authorise the schedules were under the criterion of the patron entity which would be limited to establish a scale of remunerations adapted accordingly nocturnal or daily work was to authorise the schedules were under the criterion of the paternal entity which would be limited to establish a scale of remunerations adapted accordingly nocturnal or daily work, easier or more difficult.
On the other hand, it would not be necessaries the creation of special taxes for the largest volume of the verified affairs which would be already covered by the existent tax on the sales.
I think that such a system would bring all of the advantages including the one of a better public service that would have other approach capacity to the consumer goods and services.
In what concerns to Portugal it would be enough to increase in a fifth the job capacity so that all the unemployed would be absorbed and the search started to be superior to the offer.
This process would still bring the benefit of avoiding new recruitments for the Public office, using the surpluses at the same time, that in it are vegetating, in an efficient way and to good of the Nation.
THE EXAGGERATION OF THE TAXES OF RATES
The rising at every moment to the Portuguese entrepreneur of the difficulties in the day by day of his company, take him to compare the active life with the peacefulness of putting in the Bank the money that has available, stopping being an entrepreneur to become capitalist.
Up to now, this one gave to the Bank his capital that the entrepreneur should borrow for transforming it in work and production.
The exaggeration of the interest taxes, one pays and receives ends for doing to finish in the banks the circle of money all converted in deposits impossible of transferring in investment, for the work and production.
Although it is said that is not true, this process takes to the nationalization of all the sectors and to the collectivist communist society.
To revive the private Portuguese companies assuring them the financing in good conditions, providing them they defend the borrowed money is, parallel to the resource to the imagination and Portuguese entrepreneur’s dynamism, the solution that we propose, deeply developmental far away from the politics we are following now of stopping to pay.
It is necessary and urgent to struggle seriously for modernization of the Culture, for the exploration of the underground, for the fomentation of the fishing which are the true processes of prosperity creating in the Country, of paying the debts and to improve the standard of living.
To tighten ones belt is the piece of advice of who doesn’t know to give pieces of advice and to use the imagination and the work to create wealth.
THE SMALL AND MIDDLE COMPANIES SUPPORT THIS COUNTRY
I have perceived that a usual haste makes run the tax collectors in direction to the small and middle enterprises and to the small and middle merchants.
What does this comes to be? You fiscal of the Exchequer stopped believing in the honesty of the small industrial and merchants or you do intend to suck the whole blood to who works from the morning to the night to straighten his life and not to be embarrassed of being Portuguese in Portugal?
Badly goes the Government whether expenses of who works continues to subsidize the laziness, the incompetence and the underemployment in state places where a lot it is spoken and little or nothing is created.
It is not scaring, tying and searching accountancies and more accountancies than the Government will get the millions that he needs to maintain some national institutions, which for unnecessary, are a harm-homeland crime.
When we remember that our Army spends a minimum of 41 million of contos (43) that we continue to enlist every year without any plausible justification for the fact, thousands of young men that putting a spoke in her person’s will, will spend a good part of these 123 millions euros we wondered ask if it would not be better to do intensive explanation campaigns on payments of taxes, fiscal books, etc., etc. than to sending inspectors battalions in search of fleecing the small and middle merchant, the small and middle industrial to pay a troop that should be urgently reduced, rationalized and creating an elite body with 4 or 5 thousand men in a maximum and not 50.000 that cost us a fortune and that force the tax collectors to run to and fro in search of wrong entries or of mistakes that the law doesn’t allow.
To demand body and soul to the small and middle companies is the same as to say that this country no longer exists or then that everything is safe by wires and to the smallest gale everything will collapse as a deck of cards.
THE HUMAN BEINGS’ FRAGILITY
The animalistic instinct that sickens the man does a dangerous being of him and of unexpected acts.
Today saint, tomorrow a murderer as he feels he is being wrongly pursued and his saturation degree has reached the limits imposed by himself as dignity pattern and of personality. In addition, to this saint, to this crazy or this murder nobody escapes, as he turns indifferent to the consequences and the voices of those that surround him.
See what happened in America.
Ronald Reagan, President of the United States and the most powerful Man in the World, the better guarded and the better watched doesn’t die for chance, for a stroke of luck, what does come unequivocally demonstrate that if this happened with this man that commands the world, that gives orders to the world and only needs to press a button to make this disappear, how many times, an infinite number of times more, won’t we be vulnerable before the rocks and the dangers that surround us everyday?
All those who spend their lives provoking useless discussions and intrigues and driving those who work to lose their patience and their time, must meditate in the human’s being fragility.
Even the saints are liable to become murderous. In addition, who believes that is not so, very little connoisseur of the human nature is.
WILL IT BE WORTHWHILE TO STAY IN THIS WORLD?
For incredible that it seems wear one spends twenty million euros per minute to manufacture weapons and ammunitions whose only usefulness is to kill.
The human being knows judiciously and concretely the path of the good, he knows how to proceed towards his fellow creature, he perfectly knows that it is banned to him to attempt against his neighbour’s life and however, for a huge madness act he spends a fabulous fortune to kill his neighbours. That is, his other human beings companions in the Earth, his friends, his fellows.
How are we going to justify that the man has transformed himself in the only animal capable of killing for pleasure?
After all why and for what we do centralize our life in the unrestricted desire of killing? Just for economic reasons, just for the anguish of possessing more than the other ones.
We crossed already a phase in that the man killed for religious reasons, next the man killed for ideological and political reasons, now he slays for a little of land, for the domain of the seas or for the domain of the gold, of the silver, of the cereals, of the fruits, of the trees that God put in the earth for all, with kindness and love.
"Love you each other" are the Christ words that sound now very far away. Already nobody knows what is the fraternity.
To join the weapons that are manufactured everyday the drug, the alcohol, the madness, the crime, the insecurity in the streets, the terrorism, the kidnapping.
Will it be worthwhile to stay in this world?
Actually it is not worth. Then it pleases to do the banal gesture of who abandons the tramway saying calmly:
Please stop the world that I want to get out!
THE MADNESS IN THAT WE LIVE
We occupy our time entirely producing to win money, to buy and to spend what we produce.
The man stopped thinking in the man because he thinks exclusively about the fast production of objects from the atomic bomb to the detergents and beauty products.
Suddenly we reached the conclusion that a lot of our production is an authentic social and ecological crime.
Meditating a little we wouldn’t have to resigning wholly to the technique and the progress, nor we would need to continue the desperate aggression to the Nature that is verified in our days.
The warning is serious and urgent. Or we ruffled road or the humanity stands before a catastrophic and inglorious end.
The recent war in the Golf was an act of collective madness in that it is worthwhile to meditate.
The fault belonged neither to Bush, nor to Saddam.
The fault belongs to the humanity that gets lost in a crisis of madness that nothing has of useful or of beautiful, and it will take, unavoidably, to the total destruction of the life on the earth.
WE LIVE IN A DEEPLY UNEQUAL WORLD
In all of the countries of the world a wave dehumanizing wave that forces the people passes today close in themselves and to fall in a voluntary isolation.
It is the solitude of the crowds.
It is the isolation.
The road for the sadness, for the anguish, for the aggressiveness.
In such conditions and for a lot that one want is not possible to live happy.
It is not possible to transmit to the other ones that happiness, nor in the private life nor in the exercise of the profession.
Parallel to the school action that, better or worse, all of the Governments develop becomes urgent that all of the people of the world insist in a humanization campaign giving to the life other dimension and privileging the social understanding, combating the aggressiveness and making possible the good disposition.
This idea that on principle is deprived of practical viability is well a pivotal point for us to build a better life, for us to have a more attractive and nice professional activity what is equal to say in order to work better and produce more.
The world will radically become transformed the next ten years. All have to specialize in an activity.
The wages will grow and it will disappear of the Earth the ghost of the poverty.
Of course we spoke like this to Europe, a part of America, a part of Oceania and probably for a small part of Asia.
Unhappily, American and South African, deeply depressed areas, will still continue during centuries in the shameful delay in that they dye of hunger or they succumb to diseases that the civilized world put down entirely there are dozens of years. It is necessary not to forget that in the 14 thousand islands of Indonesia there are still tribes in the middle of the Stone Age.
The deeply unequal world will take centuries to reach a relative and including normality of all the humanity.
It will probably never get it.
In spite of everything what is said and above all of the awful that it is demonstrated in what concerns Portugal is good to remind that our country is in twenty fourth place in the rank list of the more developed countries, being able to, thanks to CEE till to the end of the century lower to the twentieth position.
We may not say we have a pink future, but it is also exaggeration to paint it in black.
God grant that the necessary effort in the field of the Education be not postponed, and in quality, so that it matches our needs and imperatives.
Everything depends on the knowledge and of the enterprising spirit of those who will be chosen this important and urgent mission to a successful conclusion.
THE APARTHEID EXISTS
If we want to think without fanaticism and with lucid spirit on what the apartheid is we will understand at once that it exists in all the societies.
Then I propose, to the dear readers, to think for some minutes, in the broad difference that exists in Portugal among well off, remedied and poor whose social intercourse is not made at any level.
Otherwise, let us see:
While the rich have their private transports, the poor have the public ones or they must walk.
While the rich have their private clinics, the poor die waiting for the consultation in the Public Medical Centres.
While the rich attend luxury schools, the poor are solaced with the, a, e, i, o, u of the school of the municipality.
Of course, in spite of everything, we live in perfect and fraternal democracy while the South African apartheid, that it is not more than technique conviviality, makes possible to organize and make progress properly the several ethnic groups.
This way and in spite of the critics shot against the South African regime, nobody, until today, got in Africa, anything alike on behalf of the black communities.
Let us have the courage of thinking that an only socio - cultural levelling will be able to bring one day to South Africa the full racial integration done with coherence and defending the interests of all, because all will have one day the same possibilities and capacities.
THE CREDORS ATTACK
The terrible mistake that the super powers are committing concerning Brazil takes us to alert all the greedy of the dangers of their greed.
We have to know to wait and everything will be paid.
Both the United States and all the capitalists that, unthinkingly, pull the desperate debtor’s rope are blind or they are crazy. They are digging their own destruction for they wanted to do easy businesses with whom must accept all the imposed conditions.
The debt of the of Latin America countries should go around 300 billion dollars. The slice of Brazil is very big, but all we know that Brazil is the country of the future where with time and some work the human being will live more and more happy estimating for the harmonious conjugation of creeds and races that there pontificates, where love is stronger than money.
The great dissimilarity between Brazil and the other nations is the following: love, happiness of living, pleasure in standing in the world and in the certainty that one lives once only.
I am sure that in the final judgement, the only ones that will be entitled to the Prize will be those who speak Portuguese and, among those, the Brazilians will occupy the first place.
Today the wars are not so much chemicals or atomics, but, ideological and there were countries that already understood that. Will that be that the United States already understood the warning or do they insist on their soul - bell when Brazil will give its last and will drag with it all those whose avarice and unconsciousness was very more superior than its good sense?
AMARO DA COSTA VERSUS NOBRE DA COSTA
On September 7, 1978 in the Assembly of the Portuguese Republic, it began an unusual and historical challenge. The last generation of politicians retreated before the first organized technocrats' invasion in the Government.
The parties attend perplexed to the invasion of the power by the technical and all-powerful soul.
The army invader, led by a technical brings in the luggage the remedy which will erase the buzzing of the political public speaking we inherited from the 19th century.
Whoever the relinquished it matters above all to point out that a new lot is thrown in the last traditional Parliament of Europe.
Amaro da Costa is politically a world that was, Noble of Costa, is a world that will be.
The two hundred and a half of improvised politicians left for some months the labour workshops, bend of wonder with these profession managers' blow that govern through the computer.
The country, or better, the countries that undressed a long time ago their religious neurosis release now their political psychosis in order to organize in a gigantic company, inexorably organized in the practice of the possible and of the desirable.
Amaro of Costa, Jaime Gama, Menéres Pimentel and others went to the attack, shooting against an enemy in whose vulnerability they don't believe.
The theoretical humanism, the populism, the spoony grandiloquence fall in the keys of the machine of the others that answer through numbers, calculate mathematically the additions, the multiplications and the divisions.
The new chapter of the political philosophy calls itself mathematics, if they want political mathematics. It is possible, for the time being, that Nobre da Costa didn’t stay in the Government. However, we are sure, it is fatal that the technicians will impose again and command this process.
Even it can fall the case, before the resistance and the persistence of the bench politics, the Power moves suddenly for outside, for the ministerial rooms of the immense boards of directors. Then it is only to attend the gradual depreciation and the systematic indifference of the great political crises.
We already live without Government for months. We can go on living without Government for years...
THE CRISIS
Unlike a lot of people thinks, the crisis that afflicts Portugal crosses a mere economic crisis and it is much more serious.
From an economic crisis, it is gotten to leave soon or later, being enough to search a new production form, revitalize the work, to strengthen the coin, to revive the agriculture, that is, to apply to the evil one of those recoveries that are universally used.
Unhappily the case of Portugal is much more serous, the crisis, more than economic is an afflictive case of morality and conscience.
The generation that governs us is in deep crisis.
Nobody believes anybody.
Nobody is able to put the interests of all, in the places of their own interests.
What happened with the Democratic Alliance is actually an authentic incomprehensible case, politically and socially
How is that an alliance composed by ideological close party men that knew each other and if they respected each other controlling the mechanisms of the government and of the economy how itself desegregates ending with disagreements in the head group, which show a total contempt for the interest of the country and for the future of Portugal.
In the people of this quality hands the country is dead and worse than in Philips age.
In our days world it can perfectly be faced the dissolution of a homeland for rulers incompetence.
The history is full of empires that today only the memory exists and that, for a reason or for other, they were swept of the map.
Will be this the Portuguese’s will in the end of the 20th century?
PORTUGAL LOST THE POLITICIAN THAT FAR AWAY POINTED TO THE FUTURE.
With Adelino Amaro da Costa dies the last hope from translating democracy in Portugal for happiness, for good disposition, for soul greatness and for love to the neighbour.
Plus than a great politician was a man with the high notion of what is standing in the world and to serve the other ones.
It was not only the CDS S, nor the AD to lose with his death. Portugal lost the politician that far away pointed in the future.
Personally and beyond all his talent was a great friend that we lost, of those that mark a time of our life and of which will remember everyday as if it was alive and continued to our side.
THE MOST INTELLIGENT MAN AND THE MOST GENEROUS THAT UNTIL TODAY I KNEW
He would be 39 years old just on April 18, my friend Adelino Amaro of Costa, probably the most intelligent man and the most generous man that I knew until today.
Amaro da Costa was, in all his humility, a superior Man to his fellow creature's service.
Amaro da Costa said one day that his Party’s mission was to educate the right of Portugal. And he was a privileged one to exercise that subtle mission, not only of the right, but of the Portuguese People.
Intelligent, very honest in his procedure, infinitely patient, as if the time for him didn’t proceed, Amaro of Costa, left the memory of a fabulous work that the destiny wanted to postpone.
Some days ago, a journalist called him Sá Carneiro’s fairy for his capacity to dialogue and of driving for the best.
Amaro of Costa would truly be the Fay of this Country if the fate doesn't have abandoned him so tragically.
Naturally, men of this nature are little accessible, distant, secluded, grumpy, difficult in dealing.
Adelino Amaro of Costa was, in this aspect, a sympathy squanderer.
Talented Actor, man of a thousand occupations, impressive in his communication strength and in his affability, he got all of this with cogency, distinguishing each friend, each situation and each case.
To remember him with longing is to know that this man's example will accompany us forever in a healthy nostalgia of continuing the usufruct of the inexhaustible message that it was his life.
Adelino is no longer a man of the power, no longer powerful man, however it consoles us, infinitely more, to speak of him and for him now, when everything that passed continues to be, not a simple memory, but the hope of better days for which he struggled enthusiastically when the death prepared him an ambush.
The spirit of Adelino Amaro of Costa continues alive and present in the memory of his friendship and in the hope of his hope as there are men that don't die, since the alive ones take charge, for necessity and devotion, of leaving them by their side eternally.
HOW MUCH A WOMAN WORTH?
Owing to the unexpected affluence of hundreds of letters on feminize subjects, our collaborator Inês de Castro asked me for an opinion about the woman’s condition.
In order to analyse the woman’s capacities and her larger or even smaller capacity in relation to the man, we will have to give her the same life conditions whether in the professional field or in the family, sexual and cultural aspects. This accompanied, naturally, by mixed schools and opportunities alike in all of the domains of life.
Created and applied these conditions, the woman will be free from the ancestral effects that have reduced her to a simple object since the World is World. Starting from these premises, then we can observe the largest or smallest similarity between the sexes. Although we leave from a certainty, as I will demonstrate it in my book the Woman’s Liberation.
The woman is more capable, stronger, and more intuitive than the man. Why she doesn’t take advantage of these qualities, that’s very difficult to understanding.
However, we return to the analysis we was doing.
In the conditions of total quality, I am convinced that, in the human life, the crime will stop existing and the passion, becoming the man and the woman a perfect society where each one will have enough and the great emotions will stop existing.
Although I think that it is of full justice to recognize the woman’s value and that it urges give her back her dignity that was always denied her, even so I can not leave admitting that for me, and I am convinced for 99 percent of the men too, it was always more comfortable this feminine subservience. In what concerns myself I adored to have lived my time where the great dramas alternate with the great comedies, where it is possible to pass from the misfortune to the abundance and where the life is commanded by that wonderful incognita that one calls hope.
This is not possible any more. The woman is as worth as the man. The charge of the World belongs her for alternation and it is probably the life that waits us from the beginning of the 21st century. I’m sorry for no longer can enjoy that leisure and to confirm that, finally, the human being is humanized.
THE PORTUGUESE CONTINUE CLUNG ON TO PRIME MINISTER PANTS
In this subsided country close to the sea planted, there was a maxim which said “nothing ventured, nothing gained”. Now everybody wants his or her profit without having to venture. Sometime ago I heard in the radio an artist of ours who said he didn’t sing because the State didn’t give him enough conditions. This is too much! It didn’t give him conditions. Then, who put him the hand on his mouth?
In CEE were we entered full of complexes and crestfallen. Nobody will feel sorry for us, we will become somebody, or … we are badly.
Outside people go ahead, they risk, they assume. Here our aim is at subsidies.
The Portuguese have to be convinced once for all, and it must be as soon as possible, that the State boss ended. Formerly Uncle Antonio solved everything and to those that he didn’t solve anything compelled them to emigrate
In conclusion, we lost a priceless time and let go the youngest blood we had here.
Europe grew up and lives well because the State gave voice to the people.
Portugal continues hopelessly clung to on Prime Minister pants while this one tries to emancipate a people that he loves and to whom he has given the best of his intelligence. Fifteen years are already passed after the April 25. For many it was a very big trauma. It is understood and it is accepted, but we cannot walk eternally crying to lamenting what is irreversible.
It is necessary to show again to the world that the Portuguese intelligence continues serving as ferment for the peoples of all over the world just as it was in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries.
We didn’t lost qualities, we were only retempering forces.
CAVACO, CADILHE E BELEZA, THE SCAPEGATES
Constant dissatisfaction, an exacerbate masochism and a lamentation of rancidity sinking make of the Portuguese the most grumbler people in the whole Europe.
Latin, adventurer, improvisator and professionals, never anybody got to force this people to be governed with head, regularly, with administration techniques just as Cavaco Silva intends, attended by Leonor Beleza and the very bombed Cadilhe, who has been dirty with the most abject that has got out from the heads of many journalists who saw assured this way the salary to the end of the month.
Actually, the life that the spartan Cavaco and the imperturbable Cadilhe have been trying to impose for salvation of the Country suffers the most varied replies and it comes from the most different quadrants.
The Portuguese doesn’t accept this life of squeezes deems he never needed march guide to go to India, nor planned Aljubarrota to kick the Spaniards through all the borders.
Napoleon was victim of our surprise too and all this without abdicating of the “fado” (36), of the red wine and of half Bairro Alto that it is this whole country..
When the things turn out badly to the right we do a revolution and things begin to turn out badly to the left. If things turn out badly to the left the revolution is inverted what allow at lest four years of festivities, of manifestations, of strikes, of speeches, of putsches and other stupid things. But to work is prohibited and Cavaco Silva doesn’t admit jokes, he thinks this mess is already enough, that Portugal has grown up enough and decided to govern following the European parameters.
No matter the Portuguese go off the deep end. Cavaco doesn’t take half measures: for the greediest contestant he put them the minister Leonor Beleza to care their health.
At last, somebody that knows the Portuguese appears!
To continue improvising in a world where professionals are more and more professionals, it is to prepare the collective suicide that Cavaco Silva will never allow whoever he will hurt.
THE RULER CANNOT BE AFRAID OF MISTAKING
To govern a small country and easy to handle as Portugal is not viable only to fearful men of the critic, of what people say and of the jokes of bad taste.
The ruler cannot be afraid before the mistake. His attitudes and decisions have already the possibility of repair. What he cannot do is to hesitate, to delay and nothing do.
Portugal is a country as governable as Switzerland, Holland or Sweden, it is necessary simply to want and the determination of beings that there inhabit for developing and create the welfare longed for all the Portuguese. To accomplish that transformation fast, efficient and correct of this Country it is urgent that its collective develop into the true extension of the thinking and intelligent man, it is necessary that the man serves himself of the collectivity too as he is going to serve himself of more heads and more arms.
The collective is a grow of forces and for such a reason it is pressing that the men and the women that compose the Portuguese society collaborate, not only with the central Government, but with the local Autarchies where they are living.
Whatever the parties the local Autarchies belong, it is a duty of every citizen to render them the help in the accomplishment of the objectives that the autarkists, Mayors, Parish Councils, Presidents and Aldermen intended. It is urgent that the man put an end once for all to his ferocious selfishness, with his fruitless self-sufficiency to achieve the collective of a village, of a town, of a city, in short: of Portugal.
WHAT IS POLITICS?
It is usually said that the Portuguese are disenchanted of the politics and that they don't participate, they are not interested, they don't at least deign to criticize or to eulogize what is badly or that it is well.
For that reason there is who thinks, and with all the reason, that this can pass by the national saviour who brings to cross - wise the bag of the miraculous medicines.
However, what seems us important it is to inaugurate a new methodology to open a true door to the political methodology and the resolution of the problems that interest everybody.
The candidates that we today chose die at the end of the electoral campaign...
The people lie down a vote and it suffers to the next campaign.
Actually, the social evolution of the last decades is of such way feeble that is noticed the politicians' incompetence.
We don't know what is necessary; we don't know who is necessary.
The politics stopped being a close administration of very concrete things and it started to be an accessible science only some.
Today, to every step, one hears to say "I don't understand anything of politics", properly speaking; I don't understand anything of mathematics or of chemistry, forgetting that the politics is the price of the water and of the light, of the litter of the milk, of the meat, of the fish, of the bread.
Don’t understand anything of politics is not to comprehend anything of the life and of that, while we walk in this world, it doesn't remain us other medicine if we don't understand the most possible.
THE REAL COUNTRY AND THE POLITICAL COUNTRY
Unable to manage a country, we ended for arranging two: the real Country and the political Country.
It is important to know so that each one places and act, what we understood for real Country, with whom it counts, what it does.
What is the political country, as it aligns, to what side plays.
First, the real:
Without fear of been denied it seems not to offer doubts that this is the Country that emigrates, that works, that suffers. It is the wages’ payer Country; it is the wealth creators' Country. It is the farmers' Country and of all the ones that make day by day the money with that they pay the others.
The real Country is that which invents eating everyday, it is the Country which neither feels Sundays nor holidays, it is the Country of always, it is the Country of the dignity and of the work, it is the Country of the history.
The politician Portugal, is the political ignorance, it is the political malefaction which are, in this Country, famous synonyms.
The politician Portugal sucks the perspiration of its fellow creature's face, drinks them the blood, removes them the meat.
The politician Portugal imports from outside all the possible mercantilisms and the possible whisky transforming the Portuguese left in a resulting of liquor of Scotland.
The political Country is the son that doesn't work, that dissipates the fortune, that demands automobile, that beats his father, that takes drugs and falls, everyday, in a new social rag. The political country is the Mongol criminal, childishly aggressive and dangerous.
Overnight the political Country returns to the Red cross of Caxias and the sanatorium of Peniche. It is that the freedom doesn't spare mastication. And... there is no nobility without wealth supporting it.
AN ASSEMBLY TO 19TH CENTURY
The Assembly of the Republic where are mixed and collide four palates of socialism collide continues to be an anaemic organ and without power to a country that needs urgently of vitality , of intelligence and of laws of work regulators, so that the idlers and the unemployed must contribute to the national welfare.
Actually, the Assembly of the Republic has not been more than the mirror of the Country where everything continues disorganized, destroyed, reviled and mocked. It is an assembly with all defects of last century and that it insists unjustifiable to maintain them.
There are still few days, the Assembly of the Republic, lost a whole afternoon, what represents hundreds euros spend , to discuss if a program of TV, written by a pseudo historian and produced by a director with as many scruples as the first, had or hadn’t have been exhibit.
In any civilized country the inquiries, the faults and the punishments, if they existed would be committed to the television administration. This would be reason to close the incident and to continue the work, which is the one that is necessary to improve and to get better everyday.
And so, when everybody thought that one began to give to the acts the importance they require decide the Deputies to harangue for five hours about the adventures and the Caesars’ “historian” misfortunes to know if it was worthwhile to scorch the man.
Any of them happened, lifting the trembling hand, to put in guard against the holy war.
And the country continues without a regulation of Health, without a regulation of Teaching, without alimentary circuits, without intensify the fishing, without pitch that dignifies the highways.
It is urgent that the Assembly of the Republic becomes a respectable centre of fast modern and useful decisions. The Country, that chose her and pays her, cannot wait for another thing.
WHEN PORTUGAL WAS AN EMPIRE
When Portugal was an empire had seven ministers, three secretaries of State and about 100 Deputies.
It was practically this political class that we had to pay because at the level of City Councils one worked for devotion and land love.
The people paid, naturally, the political clan that didn't live badly, they were simply few. Today, reduced to the Portugal of Europe, Azores and Madeira, the political class increased from one to 1000 and that raise corresponded to an undisguised gluttony regarding the National Budget of the State, which come out of the pocket of all of us.
A countless hive of politicians, devours the corpse of a Country plenty of leeches that suck for everywhere.
Nevertheless, are we, at least, better well governed?
The answer will be left to the reader's choice because we feared that if we respond ourselves it could be thought a case of political running sectarianism.
However, let’s meditate in these numbers: the Deputies passed from 100 to 250 and the expenses with the Assembly of the Republic increased 500 times.
Is the advantage of that difference worth?
The municipalities, which in this Country are counted for more than three hundreds, all of them, besides the president, council members on full time, well played, well furnished of food and drinks and moving in Mercedes, which left them the “fascism”, or they buy new Mercedes as it finishes the motorized inheritance.
In spite of all this it is obvious that the governing is deficient.
Summarizing and saying the unpleasant truth:
It is necessary once for all to end with these privileged marginal classes
to what we call political ones.
THE WEAPONS ARE THE SCHOOLS, THE FACTORIES AND THE MINES
Military men ranging from 1910 to our days have governed Portugal, at level of presidency of the Republic.
Not considering the Salazar consulate, where the military Presidents were mere ornamental illustrations, we attend today to the maintenance of a misunderstanding that keeps the Armed forces in the top of the political-social hierarchy with warranty of internal peace and of national independence.
If such presuppositions had formerly some worth are today completely outdated, and a military man in the presidency of the Republic is perfectly a baseless act for diversified reasons.
In first place, the actual soldiers are clearly unprepared for that kind of positions.
On the other hand, to the Nation it doesn't interest the military road whose value and purpose are highly debatable.
We can say, without fear of being denied, that an army, in countries as Portugal, doesn't pass of a usefulness full empty symbol.
The period in which we are living is too much sensitive to lose time with a candidacy that is not of an intelligent and honest man who has given proofs as administrator and as financial.
In Portugal there will be half a dozen names of the so called general of the Industry whose profile is perfectly combined with the presidency of our Republic and with the urgent tasks that are imposed to the Portuguese people.
The independence of Portugal will be locked, through the next years, in the field of the work and production.
The Army changed of hands and of tactic. The weapons are the schools, the factories, the highways, and the mines.
We need a man to govern who creates a richer Portugal, more prosperous and fairer.
We need a man to govern that transforms this Country in a very organized company, well managed, very profitable.
In it is not worth to distribute poverty.
Neither G3, nor the military parade, solve whatever happens to be worked out.
AT THE WHIM OF THE FORTUNE
According to statistics recently published, Portugal was the country that last year received larger number of tourists.
For those that, distracted with the own navel, don't want to see what happens around we are going to give some reasons for those the foreigners seek us and they delight eagerly in this Portugal which we insist on not enjoying it in our own advantage, giving right to the Portuguese dictation: "gives God the nuts to whom doesn't have teeth."
If we will think a little, what for the Portuguese is a tremendous sacrifice, for he doesn't like to think, most of the times makes the things at random, messily, believing more in the intuition than in the reason and seldom caring about the consequences. "It will be at God’s willing" and with this scream of hope and simultaneously of unconsciousness there we have Portugal done to the measure of our inconstancy and the history filled of greatness and of poverty because we have been living, in this election Country, almost always haphazardly.
But let’s leave the late considerations and we will see why the tourists, the industrial and the inhabitants of the other countries seek us so eagerly and a lot of them finish to stay.
Let us see the reasons:
Portugal is the country of Europe with higher annual medium temperature.
The price of our coin in comparison with the coin of the other countries turns possible the acquisition of lands and of industries through amounts absolutely ridiculous.
Any retired Couple of reformed of Central Europe and of the North lives, in Portugal, ten times better than in his own country.
The criminality index in Portugal is the lowest in Europe.
The current legislation benefits extraordinarily the foreign landowner.
The Portuguese people privilege extraordinarily their relationship with the foreign person.
Portugal is the less industrialized country and the fewer polluted in Europe.
These reasons, that we just stated, prove to the evidence that this Country that we inhabit is a small paradise where all of us can live happily if we will want it.
The foreigners already discovered us. It is time to discover ourselves.
IT IS PROHIBITED TO DO INNOVATIONS
The Portuguese merchants' confederations appear a lot of times in the television to ask the most several privileges and to deplore the deep crisis in that are immersed the small and medium merchants.
For what happens in our Country only admires us that the crisis is not still larger because of the obsolete practice and usage that govern our commercial houses.
Through the businesses world the commercial schedules are totally free what takes the responsible for the business to adapt to the best time – tables in agreement with the interest of the customers.
In the world where almost all the adults are busy from Monday to Friday, from nine to six p. m., I think essential that the schedules work start from this hour and Tomar advantage integrally of Saturdays and Sundays.
But nothing of this is practiced in Portugal.
The merchants see themselves forced governmentally to proceed as simple public officers that work when the others work and than forces them a lot of times, to not accomplish their obligations completely for been supplied of the essential.
However, not only the shops of the trade should take in account this schedule decentralization. The same should happen with Finances bureaus, City halls, Ministries services, Social – Medical services, giving so to who works the possibility to benefit more easily of the services that, after all, live of their wallet.
It is never too much to assert this although we perfectly know that in this Country is prohibited to do innovations and improvements.
We become used to live miserably and even if it is easy, it seems that it doesn't matter to get out of the mire.
PORTUGAL IS ON VACATION
After the war, to rebuild Japan and Germany any citizen, without regarding ages or positions, accepted to work 14 hours a day and renouncing the vacations.
This politics got to rebuild Germany and Japan in record time and to transform them in world potencies, superiorly administered, which outstripped the winner countries of the war, they that had been the big defeated.
The Portuguese, cut off of the Overseas Empire, suffered a more violent traumatism than the own Germany and Japan after the war. Then, it was fitting us, to organize the restoration of Portugal, daringly, as if it was a personal action of all and in a way that we ended for suffering for little time and the least possible.
Nevertheless, what it happens is unhappily full different.
We make strikes, we miss the work for constant imaginary illnesses, and we work little. For this reason, the Government is going removing us furtively the meat, the fish, the milk and the bread.
Many ministries of this Government don't know how to make this country produce, they don't know both how to solve the crisis or how to create motivation and work capacity in a people that is only waiting that the rulers incite it, and afford it the means to do of Portugal the prosperous Country for what all are longing.
DESPERATE SITUATION
In a country where the bank tax is of 26% of net profit and the business boundary doesn't usually hit that value, it is not worthwhile to speak of investment at least at level of the medium business that it is after all the great job power in Portugal.
On the other hand is the Government itself that grows impracticable the bank credit in the area of the honest work.
Nobody knows, actually, where one want to arrive through this path when the small, the middle and great companies are overloaded with endurable fiscal burdens to pay the debts and clearing up the economy, destroying the organization in the work and turning more and more unsuitable of arriving to the consumption goods.
As we think this is close to put the Nation in a scarcity state that puts us in an after war of Europe.
We are allegedly a poor country, without Overseas, without industry, without raw materials, and without agriculture.
For that very reason, we have tourists and emigrants that are those who don't live here.
THE GREAT MOTOR OF THE MODERN ECONOMY
When today it is spoken, in Portugal, of the man's exploration for the man all we know that that is not true and the worker that feels that in present circumstances have to give his maximum profit in order to pick up his benefits.
And consequently, in such way this is so that both entrepreneurs and workers noticed since a long time that the great motor of the modern economy exists precisely, in the workers' purchase capacity.
If we will think a little, all of us will understand that nobody is interested in producing automobiles, freezers or washing machines if the market that embodies the production is not able of consuming them swiftly.
The modern economy, far away from seeing in the worker a bare manufacturer, craves to fit him with high purchasing power so that himself consumes great part of what he produces and to give origin to new productions.
This consuming society, that many criticize, is that that affords the poor the freezer, the vacuum cleaner, the washing machine in their homes smoothing so the day by day of the woman, housewife and worker.
We must not in any way, to divide poverty in the poverty. For this very reason, we incited all to the work so that the tomorrow is not only a hope, but also the reality that produces the comfort and the well-being.
We are for the total freedom of the production, for the fomentation of the consumption; we are, in a word, for the abundant society, where each one is entitled, since he works, since he doesn't sponge, to his share and to the prosperity of life.
ALL WAITING THAT THE LOT FALLS FROM THE SKY
The climate, the blood and the dream that lives in each Portuguese makes of him a inveterate idealist confusing a lot of times the reality with the fiction, and for that very reason committing mistakes that the colder head's countries don't forgive.
With the entrance of full right in the EC we have to begin thinking less in the cases of the luck and more as we will solve our problems without for that to have to enter in despair.
Some foreigners of the most intelligent and better installed in life, that along my strolls across the World I have known, all are unanimous in assert that the Portuguese are very lazy of head, that they don't like to urge thinking machine with subjects that present some difficulty and prefer to imagine how it would be good to win the lottery, the totoloto (37) or the totobola (38). This is not well like this.
We, Portuguese, are not inferior to any people of the world.
We have already demonstrated it and the most evident proof are the discovered countries, settled and civilized and that lived and they grew in fraternal harmony with us.
What is the reason then why we set out complaining of the difficulties that distress all of us? From the Government to the more defenceless, all fall back on stratagems that cannot take to good port, instead of picking up of the intelligence the most capable and more effective solutions to help not only our survival as to increase the prosperity of each one too, without having to appeal to the degrading "alms for the love of God", to the fraudulent subsidies or the constant increase of duties.
We have, pressingly, of entrusting in each other; we have to think in the businesses that we are proposed, not in a way of deceiving the neighbour or of an immediate profit. We have, in short, to make profitable our savings not putting them under the mattress or standing them inert and unproductive in any other side.
The money is a corporate asset that has to be put to the service of all.
The prosperousness of a country and our children's happiness is built while alive, if we don't have done it we can be sure that our life was not more useful than the one of the dogs and of the cats.
Nobody wants to leave this world with heavy conscience, because here, all know, the life is two days, but on the other side wait us millions of years of suffering or of eternal happiness, according to the life that bore here.
THE PEOPLES OF ALL OVER THE WORLD TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THEIR GENIUS
While everywhere the access to the universities depends on aptitude proofs and of anything else, in Portugal it is necessary a specific curriculum and age in order to enter them.
The people of all over the world take advantage of their genius whatever their age or the circumstances in which they are recognized.
We have children's examples with ten years who passed all of the exams of the University crossing so all the obstacles and seeing early the possibility of total use of their exceptional qualities.
Didn't Jesus go to the temple to discomfit the doctors to the seven years old?
If the son of God had had the bad luck of being born in Portugal he would be barred entering in the Temple for lack of age and, if the kind insisted, he would have earned a good hiding.
This is the dwarfs' country where we live, where the ideas of progress and of renewal arrive with centuries of delay due to the narrow-mindedness, to the fear and the blindness of a people that lives more of the backbiting, of the critic and of the envy than of the useful work and of the recognition of the human being's value, either with ten or a hundred years.
AN ARMY OF PEACE
The War of the Overseas, finished in 1974 was, probably, the last war of the Portuguese Army; this way it is indispensable to reconvert a machine of useless war in a peace device, which can constitute a high civic school of the Portuguese youth's great part.
Today, grows out of fashion the artillery, the cavalry and the Infantry. These antiquities last seconds after the arrival of the neutrons bomb.
For all this we are saying, it doesn't remain other way to the Portuguese Army except to guide the war for other enemies no less destructor as are the public calamities always so need of aid.
Actually, Sappers Firemen's activities will only will be able to have national dimension and true effectiveness if integrated in the Army.
On the other hand the transport from what it depends mainly the economy of a country cannot continue hanging on the boycott of half a dozen of irresponsible.
Thus it is required to create a parallel military action to guarantee the country that it will never be possible to paralyze as lately she have been verifying.
To an interested army in the welfare of the Portuguese people and that could serve of example to this crazy world where the race to the armaments, to the destruction and death is very much larger than the combat to the poverty and the human being's degradation could be committed some services of health, above all vaccination campaigns, disinfestations areas, combats to plagues, service of mail, transport of patients, etc. etc. etc..
To the responsible for our Army here is the appeal so that its reorganization is made with intelligence, with safety and without precipitations, on a way of helping this so thirsty Portuguese People of the peace that so much needs to begin with force and determination a new chapter of its history, where all have enough to live with dignity.
LOANS TO KILL
If some thing has been admiring us in the last times is the eager desire with that our political responsible ask and they accept biggish loans to buy weapons and to modernize the Army.
We, that already conquered what we had to conquer and already lost what we had to lose, are not in any way dependent of the largest or smaller force that our army will come to have.
It seems that everyone agrees that if today we wanted to declare war to the United States, to England, to Russia, to France or Spain the world would answer us with a resonant laughter. However we are lacked of hospitals, factories, schools, agricultural technique.
It is good not to forget that we pay in dollars a half of what we eat and that the money used in armament is a crime that not only harms the Homeland as it harms the humanity.
Portugal has to be a country of Tourism, Peace and Love, never a snared field at the entrance of Europe.
The ingenuousness of our rulers when accepting loans for armament is a very serious act and that have to be urgently rethought for good of Portugal.
LET US HAVE THE COURAGE OF BEING THE FIRST TO END WITH THE ARMY
Portugal stunned the world being pioneer of the abolition of the death penalty for the political and for the civil crimes.
It will be justified for ever and ever and with the largest dignity the Revolution of the April 25 if we take advantage of the opportunity of abolishing an army for the first time in a country of Europe.
While the high military commands and the Government want us to be promoted to warriors of NATO, well equipped, and the extreme left dreams us spearhead of the Warsaw pact, let us stop, per moments, to reformulate our attack system to the poverty, arming us with good tractors, with good fertilizers, with good highways, with good transports and with good factories, marching mightily against the poverty.
Instead of we lament ourselves for the lack of weapons we suggested the immediate sale of the whole armament we possess, the worthy reform of our soldiers definitely award, devoting later to each citizen's well-being that is born in this territory whatever the locus where he was born or the parents' social category who generated him.
To feed fallacious guiles and impertinent militarism whim is inappropriate of our generation.
The military feed the war, the war feeds the military.
It competes us to destroy this discreditable imbroglio.
A man that kills other, whatever the suit he uses, is a murderer.
Such madness is increasingly less accepted by the people.
WE CONTINUE 60 YEARS BEHIND
It is said that the Portuguese Navy will spend the equivalent to twice times the budget of the Ministry of Education and of the Health to buy anything plus, nothing less than a submarine.
They don't explain, the brave seafarer, if they will buy atomic submarines or of those cheap ones that nobody uses, but that are to deceive the countries that buy them and to fill the pockets to the states that sell them and they would have to throw them on the scarp – heap if there were not any naïve countries, of those considered of the third world and that are lacking in everything, but they have a submarine.
To have money to buy an atomic submarine, I don't believe that we have too, and on credit nobody sells of those goods that unhappily nor they are fit for the underwater fishing.
The Portuguese State has just bought three frigates that cost to the taxpayer 700 thousand euros. Frigates that are to protect us of the submarines. We are actually obsessed with the idea of tittles - tattles and, if on the one hand we want to buy them, on the other hand we want to sink them. It should be in order to dominate the seas underneath the water.
This Country is really to flabbergast. Nobody removes me of the head the idea that the blame - worthy of all this are the Spaniards that occupied us during 60 years and puzzled our brains.
From since then we never again were good at anything.
Now that the armies grow out of fashion we are going to waste what we have and we don't have in equipment that is not worth to defend anybody.
700 thousand euros were already vanished. Let us hope stops here our will of helping the other ones... to sell.
We have schools to open, highways to pave, hospitals to build and a lot of, a great lot of lack of houses. We want to believe in this Government's good-sense.
LOOKING FOR THE SCRAPS
Since the foundation of the nationality that the Church pontificated in the entire notable acts that were done in this kingdom.
The Church mingles with the tremendous spiritual force that drags the individuals by the faith, the huge intellectual force that controls everything through the reason and the knowledge. Knowledge and reason that humble themselves and dignify in the way they are mixed in the world.
Nowadays, with the job difficulty we have, when any graduate in Medicine, Laws, History, etc. refuses to occupy the place wherever he goes since that place is inside the Country, we think about the thousands and thousands of priests, also them graduate and of vast culture, that went to a village parish even the most inhospitable one of this country without a minimum complaint and there they stayed until they were so decrepit as old.
This humility turned the Church invulnerable to the materialist’s attacks.
However, the Church suffers in the beginnings of the 19th century the first attack in Portugal with Joaquin Antonio of Angular, who kills friars, and takes advantage of their goods for service of the State. Later on, the dawning Republic, given up the imagination and before blatant discredit, throws, again, the hands on the goods of the Church and there are installed schools and public services.
Ever since this Country has been living to the scraps and instead of building, of progressing it continues to raise the life on the ruins, without having the courage of doing a work from the laying of the foundations and go beyond, once for all, this Europe that walks as slow as a snail and that, even so, we don't get to reach.
EACH ONE SUFFERS HIS WAY
The trilogy father, student and teacher gets capital importance in this time.
After the April 25, in the field of the education, nobody believes in anybody.
As a consequence of this fact, the students are the big sacrificed. And to confirm this it is enough to tell you that in five groups (100 students) of the 10th year, of which I am a teacher, nine students only was never ploughed and a great part already plucked two or three times.
Are all donkeys? No. They are victims of all this legislative disorder that all the time changes of criterion and of orientation.
The teachers, how they are them? Many competent and conscious, others authentic body and soul aberrations that see in the pupil the easy way to sublimate all their complexes, frustrations and small hates that use to repressing in every day that goes past them.
The teachers, some teachers, don't worry about knowing if the student needs help, if the previous year was deficiently given and if they should do a recovery before beginning a new matter. No gentlemen. The teacher stands up straight in his “excessive pride” and says “my program is this, I have to give it and no matter the student has basis or not, that he plucks or passes, what I don't want are responsibilities.”
Sad Country this, where everyone fears to assume responsibilities and saying NO to a floating orientation. Actually, only acts like this who doesn't know, or who is badly educated.
According to the Teacher Vítor Crespo “the educational system is, in what it refers to the basic and secondary teaching, a gigantic pedagogic experience”, this way, I add, the best method to apply in order to the student gets the maximum benefit has to be the teacher to decide, to not approaching the scandalous mark from 90 to 100 percent of fails. The average is of 40%. In the developed Europe, the maximum of disapprovals doesn't reach 5 percent.
To conclude, a word on the parents. They accuse us of not supporting the children in the study. To support how? Some don't know, others are not able to and others don't have time.
The parents don't have to support or not children, the teacher yes, he has to know to motivate the students in the given matter and in the taste of learning to discover a new world, full of incentive surprises and, so much more pleasant, as more cult one is, and the more one knows.
FASHION IS WHAT FIT US IN
Compelled for duty of paternity to dress and put on shoes to the youths, I mull over the several questions that are raised to the educators' generation today before the proposals that the fashion makes to adults and adolescents.
Let us take the adolescents' case and the way of life in our days of dressing and putting on shoes.
Who will attend the students' exit of one of our high schools will have great difficulty in distinguishing his son or daughter as he sees to go through the gates hundreds of youths with the same hairdos, the same peculiar suits and the same incredible boots.
Right away one concludes that, to be original, they dress today a uniform of an army whose generals sew in Paris today or in London and explore the doltishness of a hurried youths’ generation.
No longer it is only the money that is thorny, but it is also and above all abdicating of the own taste, of thinking through his own head, of using and to take benefit of what gives pleasure, even if it is not what the others put on.
The youth of a country that copies faithfully the fashion that comes from outside lost in what is essential his personal and national independence.
Far away from us of seeing boys and girls of this Country dressed in the fashion of Minho (39) or the fashion of Ribatejo (8)!
We were very fond of seeing them dressed the preference in the style of each one, thinking through his own head so much physics as spiritually.
This for not speaking in the cultural slavery and that it is exercised on our youths, when imposing them texts and rhythms that have nothing to do with their day by day.
These souls are driven in what they dress, in what they hear; they don’t think that they can fall in abysses as drugs.
It is helpful that nobody forgets, that it is of this mass that the rulers of
this Country are going to be cut and where we are setting our hope.
TO THE EDUCATION MINISTER AND UNIVERSITIES I PROPOSE A FOURTH SCHOOL PERIOD
The drama, our people's true drama is to live in an Europe that bet in the culture and in the instruction a hundred years ago, while we bet in the laziness and in the emigration.
In short, we are an unprepared people to inhabit in Europe in this final of the 20th century where it is necessary, not only, to know to read, to write and to count, but to go much far away competing with merchants' generations graduated in excellent polytechnic schools and where the industry specializes their workers like we are capable still doing to our engineers.
It is evident that we cannot think about maintaining the schools we have that only know how to teach the privileged ones the ones which would learn even without school.
To the students with difficulties waits them very comfortably the failure.
It is in the sense of avoiding that that happens that we call from here the attention to Mr Minister of Education and Universities.
Your Excellency has really a very simple and effective method to reduce the School failure drastically, the cause of delay of this country and true charged of the evils that have afflicted us through all times.
Your Excellency to continue the Academic year normally until September 15 forcing to the permanence, in this fourth period, the late ones with the goal of recovering great part of them and you will see within few years that Portugal will discover much more applied students, more diligent teachers and very more profitability in the Preparatory and Secondary field.
Explaining better, to finish the classes on June 5 for the students that have worked and have profited, and would continue at the School those that, at this time, would not have success until the moment in that the teachers considered them capable, in other words, until July 5, until August 5 and to September 15 for the most difficult. These, if even so they didn't obtain approval would repeat the year.
The school buildings continue in the same places and the teachers and the employees are paid... for such a reason, this practice doesn't cost more to the state than the water, the light and the chalk.
We have to agree, Mr. Minister that this attitude is an act of courage and galloping imagination that it would radically change this Country, and it would reduce the school failure to 2 or 3 percent while today we wait for failures in the annual from 30 to 40 percent.
Please Minister say, and my dear readers too if it wouldn’t be worthwhile to prepare, for the close future, a Country with masterly people in the trade, in the industry, in the agriculture and in the services?
For the fact of being cleaning employee, gardener or digger one cannot feel that those actions and those professions are only for stupid and ignorant people.
The bricklayer and the bricklayer's mate will be so much better as professionals and so much happier as people the more cults. They are, the same happening to the housewives and the domestic maids.
This that we are coming to say has to be the tendency of a country that is intended in Europe and that has true respect for the citizens that integrate it.
What is said, as you want or not, it is important and it is true.
It is necessary to have courage for putting in practice? Actually it is. But it is for that that serves the Government and very especially the minister of the Education.
PORTUGUESE LANGUAGE
It is not for mere patriotic reason that we defend the Portuguese's institution as language of present universal interest among those who are being obligatory in the official organisms and translated simultaneously in all of the official ceremonies.
Actually, we continued to be a small Country of ten million inhabitants, but we had the rare ability to get that the Portuguese language is today the language mother of 150 million men, women and children dispersed all over the world.
Besides, before this number, really fabulous, it is convenient to add yet that the Portuguese People is today in turning points of the world!
It leads the Atlantic Ocean with the triangle Angola, Brazil, Portugal for not speaking in Guinea, Cape Verde, Madeira and Azores. On the other side of Africa, Mozambique and Goa do with Timor the new triangulation where to speak Portuguese is indispensable.
Macau, in spite of its reduced dimensions is today a fabulous point of Trade, even going beyond Hong-Kong although this last one is more spoken in the businesses world.
We have to point out that Brazil, Angola and Mozambique will be within 50 years three future super-powers whose symbol hides the largest amount of vital raw materials for the humanity's survival.
Portugal should contribute and to foment the use of the Portuguese language.
After all so a little we ask the men of the today, as our ancestors everything or almost everything left done when "distributing through the world in pieces the Portuguese soul."
Let us know how to be worthy of the glorious past especially because we can get wide advantages of an effective and universal action on behalf of the Portuguese language.
THE GYPSIES
Without problems of economic crisis, or of dwelling - places, or of teaching, the gypsies live for centuries aside our civilization and turning up their nose to the importance we give to the things and teaching, for the practice, a simpler life and more in agreement with the nature.
There is no doubt about it, they abuse our unfeignedness selling us a leprous donkey or sapping our economy with insignificant assaults that never made the stolen ones either rich, or poor: they steal chickens armed of guile, but they don't assault armed banks outfitted with G3.
A coach and a tent avoids them the Dwelling Ministry, the nightmare of the cooperatives and the horror of the politics and religious building construction.
Bothered with the atmosphere, they move carrying carts slowly along the highways as who drinks of each side of the landscape that belongs them.
They get married and they die drinking the same and singing the same.
For them neither communism, nor fascism, nor idealism. They cross borders snapping their at laws and demarcations, ignoring hates or friendships of the Government of here and of the Government of there.
The gypsies have indeed, a lot to envy in a divided world and rotten for the avarice of the material interest, for the hate, for the cruelty and for the disrelish.
For you, gypsy brother, free man in a chained world, it is going my sympathy.
HAPPY WAS CHRIST
What happens in Portugal is a deep crisis of work quality.
Undeniably it is not enough to work, it is necessary to work well.
Better than the amount is the quality what it is done.
Better than the slavery is the organization.
Better than the incentive is the labouring intelligence.
Actually we live relatively little time and, usually, it is not for the ownership of multiple goods that we reach the happiness.
It is worthwhile to understand life.
The break - up between patronage and workers is a total stupidity that mutilates dreadfully the human being, all of us, different, pretty personal, unequal, after all, all we have a career in life which is even not justified to not to be for it albeit we do, for the happiness that we have and for the happiness that we enjoy.
I have friends that possess everything and more, of those that usually feels indispensable to be happy and, however, they are not.
On the other hand I know down-and-out people, happy as the mice.
Happy was Christ that died without bill in the Bank and left us the largest inheritance of all times.
PARLIAMENTARY INTERVENTIONS
THE JUDGEMENT
I PART
Gentlemen: We have on the table an office of the Tomar district Court. The question is to know if it must be or not to be suspended of his functions of Deputy, in order to be given continuation to the correctional process that hangs in that district, Mr. José Cunha Simões, accused of crimes of press freedom.
As you Deputy know, according to art. 9, no. 3, and paragraph b), art. 65 of the Reglement, it must fall over this decision a voting through secret ballot. It is already prepared the ballot - box and already are distributed the papers in the benches. The question is to know if the Assembly understands, yes or no, that Mr. Deputy should be suspended of his functions for the pursuit of the respective correctional process.
Do you want Deputy Cunha Simões to say something on this problem?
Dr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: I want accurately to stress that it is very unpleasant for whom writes, to write under fear. There are already many years that I write and I have been making it always with smooth conscience that I am serving my Country. I have dozens of published articles and I have five books published too. Any of them can be consulted for who wants to see the matter they run.
The democracy is built in freedom and never any coercion kinds contributed to the human being's evolution. We cannot accept charismatic bosses, we want, yes human bosses liable to the critic. My article, entitled "behind the military", is just a critic, that I considered honest, to call the attention of the military for the situation in that the Country was. I didn't did it to reviling them or with malign intention, I did it yes, for this Country to meet again the peace and the serenity it needs. Of course this is my position. However, it is evident that it competes to the Assembly to decide on this subject and I don't want in any way to influence it. The question is, in fact, of a matter of opinion subject, exactly of the type of those that the Deputies should be considered immune, according to the number one of art. 160 of the Constitution.
Therefore, Mr. President and Messrs. Deputies, I am at your mercy on your decision.
President: - As Messrs. Deputies well understood, the question is, in the square of the paper that has been given to you, to write "yes" or "no ".
Pause
Did you Deputy Mr. Vital Moreira catch the speaker’s eye?
Mr. Vital Moreira (PCP): - Mr. President: it was just to ask some explanations to the Mr. Deputy of CDS.
President: - Please.
Mr. Vital Moreira (PCP): In first place, I wanted to know what dates and in what newspaper was published the incrimination object article. In second place, I liked to know who is the author of the criminal procedure. At last I wanted to know which is the reason of the incrimination.
President: - Please Mr. Deputy António Arnaut, you can begin to speak. It is sure an explanation request, it is not true?
Mr. António Arnaut (PS): - No, Mr. President. It is an application I wanted to do on behalf of the Parliamentary Group of the Socialist Party.
President: Your Excellency can begin to speak and present the application.
Mr. António Arnaut (PS): We consider this matter complex and sensitive. We don't have knowledge of the text that bases the accusation and we would like to meditate sharply on this problem, as it results of its nature, as a Deputy, our mate, is involved, so we requested that this matter would be just voted in the session of tomorrow.
President: Mr. Deputy Vital Moreira can begin to speak.
Mr. Vital Moreira (PCP): - Mr. President: Of course without opposing myself to the voting of the application and as I had previously made explanation requests, I would propose that Mr. Deputy whom I asked the explanations could answer before we vote for the application.
President: - Doesn't you in preference want before to wait for tomorrow, whether the application is approved?
Mr. Vital Moreira (PCP): - I believe that a thing doesn't prejudice the other and, even with the postponement, the application can be reinforced or not, in agreement with the explanations that we will hear here.
President: - Very well. Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões will please explain.
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - The article is entitled "behind the military" and issued in the newspaper “Templário” (40).
Voices of PCP - Ah!
The speaker: - The date is February 20, 1976. The author of the criminal procedure was the minister of the Social Communication.
I want however to add that, before this date, I had been Director of this newspaper, where I published quite more contusing articles, getting the attention for the crisis that the Country was crossing. I do want to remind that when all the publications gave covering to the statements of a Mr. Major that said that the shootings in Guinea had not been processed, I, in the same newspaper, in the leading article advised the people on those shootings and other matters that I thought of interest.
President: - Did Mr. Deputy António Arnaut catch the speaker’s eye?
Mr. António Arnaut (PS): - It was to ask to Mr. Deputy of the CDS if it was possible to afford us the text of the article in question, although to private title, given the difficulty that can exist in the consultation of that newspaper.
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): No doubt about it.
President: Mr. Deputy António Arnaut, I was just thinking in the need of obtaining photocopies for they be given to the several parliamentary groups, actually in the hypothesis of the application being approved.
Pause.
It is under voting Deputy António Arnaut’s application. Submitted to voting, it was approved unanimously.
President: Mr. Deputy Barbosa de Melo can speak.
Mr. Barbosa de Melo (PPD): - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: it was to do a brief vote declaration.
The Parliamentary Group of Democratic Popular Party understands that this matter cannot be object of a judgement under the Assembly. We are before the exercise of a fundamental freedom. One of our pairs emitted an opinion and it is not through the exam of the content of what he wrote, it is not for the judgement objective of what he wrote, that, in our understanding, the Camera of Deputies should be guided to grant authorization for the pursuit of the criminal proceeding.
Voices of PPD: Very well!
The speaker: - Nevertheless, we voted for the postponement of the voting for tomorrow for all can reflect calmly and to arrive to a decision that certainly gives steady prestige to the interests of this Assembly.
Voices of PPD: - Very well!
Mr. Vital Moreira (PCP): I catch the speaker’s eye.
President: - I ‘ll allow Mr. Deputy Vital Moreira to speak but even for my awareness I think that Mr. Deputy Barbosa de Melo doesn’t handles the problem of continuing or not the criminal procedure. What n. º 3 of art. n. º 9 of the Reglement runs as following: "moved the criminal procedure against some Deputies and pointed out this for pronunciation ruling or equivalent, out of the foreseen case in the previous number (that is the case of punishable crime with larger penalty), the Assembly will decide whether the Deputy must or not be suspended for the purpose of continuation of the process." It is the simply suspension of the Deputy. Is that right?
Mr. Barbosa de Melo (PPD): - The result is the same, Mr. President.
President: Except for the due respect, it didn't appear the same, as it seemed that the Assembly would decide on itself the pursuit or not of the pronunciation, what is not this case.
But the matter is solved.
Mr. Deputy Vital Moreira can speak.
Mr. Vital Moreira (PCP): - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: it is for a very brief vote declaration.
We voted favourably the postponement of the voting or not on the deputy's suspension because, according to the reglement, it competes to the Assembly to deliberate or to decide, as it says the article 9th. However, the Assembly to decide has to have elements that enable to do that. The Assembly doesn't decide in white. We understood, therefore, because we lacked of some elements that can be relevant for effects of our decision that was necessary to establish at least this period of one day for us to judge in conscience on the subject of the suspension or not of Mr. Deputy.
President: Plus some vote declaration?
Mr. Deputy António Arnaut can speak.
Mr. António Arnaut (PS): -We have presented the application, and voted naturally favourably, not only for the regimental expressions, but also for the reasons that we have just adduced through Mr. Vital Deputy Moreira, which, with the due permission we make ours, and still tends in attention the determination in art. Nº. 160, no. 2 of the reglement that at this time governs.
President: - It will be then given to the Groups Parliamentary photocopies of the pronunciation ruling.
THE JUDGEMENT
II PART
President: - Messrs. Deputies, gentlemen: we are going to get ready to vote for, in secret ballot, the problem, that already yesterday has been put and that it was transferred for today, of our mate Deputy José Cunha Simões. As it is an original problem for some of Messrs. Deputies, although last year we had had a similar problem, it is ready the ball box for the voting, for we begin to muster. Messrs. Deputies have each one a little square of paper for the voting. If we’ll understand that Mr. Deputy should be suspended we must write "yes"; if we understand that he should not be suspended the word to write is "no" instead;
Is there any explanation request or any previous problem before the voting?
Pause
Mr. António Arnaut (PS): - I apologize Mr. President. For my inattention and certainly only for that we didn't understand how the sense of the voting will be. "Yes" he will be suspended and "no", no suspension; is like this?
President: - Certainty. It cannot be in another way.
Mr. António Arnaut (PS): Thank you very much. I didn't have heard the explanation.
Voting was proceeded.
President: - I ask Mr. Deputy Moura Guedes and Lucas Pires the favour of serving the scrutinizers.
They scrutinized.
President: Messrs. Deputies, gentlemen: the result of the voting was the following: 220 votes in the ballot box, of which four are white, 85 are for the yes to the suspension and 131 for the no.
It will be communicated to the Tomar District Court the result.
President: Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões can speak for an intervention.
THE REVOLUTIONARY INGENUOUSNESS
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: the Revolution of April, in spite of the multiple contradictions that accompanied it since the first hours of its dawn, it seems to have maintained without contesting the fair intention of protecting the population layers, until then voted to the abandon and beyond doubt needed of renewal of mentalities and action ways that rendered possible to most of the Portuguese people to live day by day with dignity. From the most hidden outside-left the protection and safety messages arrived daily to the destitute ones, always implying that the following day the crusade would be begun abolish the whole social injustice.
To the revolutionaries of the first hour have been following the public managers of having stressed the leftist inclination, that maintained the verbal campaign and they transmitted it to the actual socialist administration, that, in turn , will do transit in white for who is entitled to.
A voice of the PS: - For the CDS.
The speaker: It can very well to be for CDS, as the CDS will give the answer as it should be.
Meanwhile the poor farmers are poorer...
A voice of the PS: And you richer!
President: Messrs. Deputies: I asked for the favour of not interrupting the speaker. It is true that are admitted incidental remarks, but I have some doubts on if those interventions are incidental remarks.
The speaker: -... the retired more miserable and, as if all this wasn’t enough, a crowd of refugees spreads abroad through the country out, marking at each town and in each village the tragedies that accompanied the decolonization. When the revolutionary ingenuousness ended with the rich in Portugal...
A voice of the PS: - Who would say?
Laughers of the PS and of PCP.
The speaker: -... maybe nobody thought that would be the most unprotected social strata again to pay the livelihood, the health and the little safety that always had, the ignorance of some and the criminal cowardice of pretty more.
The land reform, bounded to a fragment of the country, debatable in its general lines and hesitant in its process, ignores that the agricultural Portugal is not Alentejo (32) and that it is not possible to export, because none country, until today, was devoted to the import of rumours; meantime, the dozens of thousands of rural salary earners that work from sunrise to sunset, to reach the glorious pension of 500 paus (39) a month (as popular Vasco Gonçalves would say)...
Mr. Carlos Candal (PS): - Don't speak jargon, that is not fair.
Laughers
President: - Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões I have to interrupt to inform you that you filled your time. So you must conclude at once in order to not harming the following speaker.
The speaker: I am sorry for so little time.
Mr. Aboim Inglês (PCP): - But he has the Templário (40). The speaker: However, I wanted to tell you that there was a late period where, with very less people and with very less resources, they were made the Discoveries. Simply, that people were other and was taken advantage of the little resources. While in this assembly I only hear laughters, the Portuguese People continue to pay that that the Messrs. Deputies are not able.
Voices of CDS: Very well.
Protest voices.
President: - Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões can speak
THE PLUNDERING OF LISBON IN THE PROVINCE
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: Now that so much it is spoken about regionalism was convenient first, to learn to respect the patrimony of each area, ending once for all with the plundering of Lisbon on the province, from the culture to the agriculture.
Tomar is in this aspect a martyr city. Actually, ever since its immense art treasures were booty to the orders of the capital country museums. One can say that what survived of the spoil and of the ignorance is today at the Old Art Museum, in the Cathedral of Lisbon and in other national grocery stores of art.
Pictures of Gregório Lopes and the whole silver and gold that remains us of Christ's Convent are today at the museums and vestries of Lisbon.
Mr. Manuel Gusmão (PCP): - Oh, roguish!
The speaker: Even it is asserted that Saint Vincent’s panels were made for the “andor” (24).
The priests' bookstore and the rich files of S. Francisco’s convent abandoned since a long time ago the city and they never returned.
Even inside of the city and in that that is not possible to transport to Lisbon it has been insisting in purposeless and devastating occupations: Christ's Convent, that could be a tourist centre of first line, is barracks, it is seminar seat, it is housing returned people.
The improvisation must end. The Portuguese religious architecture or no, it is seriously threatened by the indifference, the disrespect, for the lack of budgets for I restore and safeguard of what should be pride of a people.
Tomar headquarters of the Military Area saw to extinguish the headquarters without the less justification and without the lightest interest. And, no matter how incredible it seems, the building where that Headquarters was installed burnt little later, burning with it a lot of books and a lot of papers that a lot of interesting stories could tell us! Until today, and although the lack of buildings is evident, the old Palace was not repaired yet.
The polytechnic Institute of Tomar, created by ordinance and plainly justified for the local interests in it involved, never got to open its doors.
To industrial area that all the plans pointed to the area of Tomar, Abrantes and Torres Novas didn't get out of the paper.
They threaten now to extinguish the agency of the Bank of Portugal, one of the agencies of larger movement in the whole country.
The bank House Mendes Godinho and sons, founded in 1917 or 1918 and mediator of the regional savings and of the emigrants' of the area deposits, was extinguished and integrated in a commercial bank. Nonsense!...
The emigration stole and it continues stealing thousands of arms that don't find answer in the local job market.
The neighbouring villages are uninhabited, the houses in ruins, the roads are desert, of the 450.000 euros...
Laughers.
The speaker: - Actually, the laughers, I had referred late to them, they are the symptom of this country, that laughs heartily a lot, but that thinks little.
Of the 450.000 euros collected per annum by the Exchequer only 5 percent are applied directly applied in this area, reverting the remaining in favour of the political mess with headquarters in Lisbon and where the Messrs. Deputies carry on laughing, what is very serious.
A voice of the PS: Ah! Ah! Ah!
The speaker: Laugh, Mr. Deputy that you'll go far.
This is well the image of the possible regionalism in Portugal and of the decentralization: send us your money and solve you your problems, it is and it was always this the word of order of the Government from Lisbon.
It is decentralized to solve the problems, but it is not allowed to decentralize when it is to receive.
The private initiative saw to annul entirely its performance possibilities, especially restrained by a group of public officers unable to answer in a commercial line that no longer is theirs.
Unhappily, this loss was not only of Tomar, but of the whole Country. And it is sad to verify that the Portuguese man still ignores the area in which he lives, he ignores the artistic and cultural wealth that he has a lot of times two steps from the house where he lives.
Mr. Lino Lima (PCP): - they Like Tourism!.
The speaker: You are right. The tourists that sought the area to the thousands dispersed as for witchery in the last two years.
Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: The regionalist and decentralizing spirit is incompatible with the pillage and with the reflex of the foolishness and of incompetence that shamelessly are walking through Lisbon.
It is not enough to say that Lisbon governs! It is necessary to govern in fact, treating the province in equal terms, and respecting and aiding their human, artistic and cultural values!
President: - Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões can speak>
LACKS OF BEIRA BAIXA
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - Beira Baixa (26), as almost the whole North of the country, is a stagnated area on agriculture where the progress hardly arrived. What is done is done for centuries what is for doing doesn't seem to the reach of who waste energies in speeches in a truly groundless and unable public organization.
If the Beira Baixa agriculture is the disillusion paradigm, what can we claim about the demotion and crush of traditional industrial centres as from always the city of Covilhã was, today on the verge of a widespread bankruptcy which will throw in the unemployment thousands of workers? We will not speak already about the promised new work posts. Nobody already wants to try to fix the Beirões (25) forced to look for the sustenance in foreign lands, more it is not required than to conserve the little that there were in conditions of worthy work for those that fixed in this area and they see from everywhere to sink the indispensable getting for a decent life.
As it is evident, the Governments say that there still was not time to do more. In what concerns us it seems that it would have, at least, had time of doing some thing and even that it wasn’t done.
The house is to Beira Baixa a reason of serious concerns: there are no sewers, no domiciliary distribution of water, the electricity distribution is scanty.
At rural level, the house is not only primitive as deprived of all the sanitary conditions and it provokes endemic diseases, regionally recruited as in the whole Europe.
The school is still, in many cases, a place to reach after a long walk, a lot of times on the snow and with wolves howling quite close.
The compulsory school to kick off at six, in no part of the world will take account such a difficult situation.
In order to stress the full lack of conditions of dwelling it is enough to look for a road network yet more outdated than the old-fashioned highways of the rest of the Country.
What the reader has not been said yet is that Beira Baixa starts in Estrela (27), that it is pointed as the great first centre of Portuguese tourism of the past and one of the most beautiful and healthier places of the world.
Extremely endowed for the practice of a Tourism of Summer and of winter, the Mountain Estrela can only complain of having been born in Portugal out of the Area of Lisbon.
The mountain, wasted in what concerns agriculture, socially lost, still didn't find who was capable of programming it in the Tourism area ally, transforming it in a centre for who runs it as Algarve, Madeira or Costa do Sol (28). It is not enough to call for the local power and for the decentralization.
To ask the local power to solve problems at this level, locally, it is of who doesn't intend to do anything but not to laugh of who makes strives solving the problems of his area.
The Estrela Mountain is a project that always went beyond the own national services of Tourism and it continues to be unthinkable to solve the question at the level of City hall. Of smaller capacity, but of maxim usefulness, it would be the urgent installation of appropriate hotel units to the area that not only could serve the tourism, but that fundamentally they turned possible to install strange operators to the area that came to it to work for more or less time.
Without condign facilities it becomes impossible to program any activities for an area since it is necessary to make move and to install outsiders. It is really this one of the presented reasons (and maybe the only reasonable) by the politicians, the technicians and the technical politicians that stay in Lisbon for 365 days.
We know that areas of this nature never had a Director Plan to seek the reorganization of the territory and obtainment of medium population nucleus of enough capacity to justify road investments, sanatoriums scholarly net, etc.
The correction of the type of settlement of Beira Baixa is there are many years urgent and several times has been tried at a level too much amateurish and hesitant. It is time of Beira Baixa to leave the apathy in that it finds dived. To the Government priority is requested for the subjects of this area.
President: - For an intervention, Mr Deputy Cunha Simões can speak.
THE PATUDOS HOUSE
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS). - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies. In the heart of Ribatejo (8) a great Portuguese and a great democrat left in the people, to eternalize his memory, and his love to the land, a work which aggrandizes day by day.
The Patudos House, inherited museum of José Relvas, it is actually a precious stone that of many years it precedes all over the world the foundations and the culture houses that later were popularized.
As everything in Portugal that concerns the art, the Patudos House that was able to and it should be continually overcrowded of visitors, it ends for serving a scarce hundred of onlookers that you, for one or another reason, are facing the things of the spirit.
Affectionately and exemplary administered, the Foundation José Relvas is an example of Institution to the service of the people, done by a man of quite broad vision, that did a constant sacrifice of the life in defence of the man's Rights and of the fundamental freedoms.
In spite of everything what was and what did, it would not be today, in acacian (30) voices, more than a woeful large landowners and an ignoble explorer of the hard-working people
In the province of Ribatejo (8), that has, now, about 500 thousand inhabitants and 6689 km2 of surface, the Patudos Museum is the only that deserves the name once in any other past of Ribatejo (8) there are musicological nucleus well organized and open to the public, as it should be of the whole obligation in a province that was scenery and heard very close the whole Historical action of Portugal.
As it is evident, so that the Museum of Old Art has at grocery store about 40.000 art pieces, it is not possible that in the province remain the necessary ones for musicological nuclei visited and worthy of interest.
Actually here I would like to call the attention for the National Museum of Old Art, where the number of visitors in relation to the art pieces that are there and to the wealth in it contained, is very tiny.
Voices of CDS - Very well!
The speaker: - Join to what has been unmatched incapacity of the responsible for the administration and conservation of the patrimony to solve, as if we were in the 19th century, inherent problems to their action programs.
In what concerns the legislation that defends the patrimony in Portugal, one can say that we fell in this vicious circle: an obsolete legislation that was, that is, and that will be. That it defends a group of employees, some of them obsolete that were, that are and that will be.
Therefore, there is nothing more inexperienced, unhappy, boring and bulky than the Portuguese monuments to except the bosses of those same monuments.
President, Messrs. Deputies, gentlemen: The Patudos House, with a stuffing of reasonable value, it can be faced fundamentally as a privileged place to house the central services of the Centre Region’s artistic patrimony.
The Patudos House has installations that could perfectly hold workshops of restoration, with capacity to answer to the demands of a limited area for the Mondego (31), in the north, and for Alto Alentejo (32) to south.
Concerning restoring, I would like to focus here an aspect that I think it is very important. The people that work in art restoring works are very badly remunerated, and they are short of several means. I appeal here so that those people are caressed, helped, in order that these people be fondle, helped and that be reviewed all that concerns them. For the matter I call special attention to José de Figueiredo Institute where there are people entrusted of the restoration of works of art, that there work with a lot of sacrifices, with far deficient remuneration. I remind the case of persons in charge that remain in the letter J.
Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: For the location and for the space it would be of Tomar advantage to profit the Patudos House and the adjacent property to install a Centre of Artistic Inventory of the Patrimony at national level with the services duly computerized.
Here one could also make the National of Itinerant Art Exhibitions Centre.
For the General Direction of the National Buildings and Monuments I address these suggestions and the sincere desire so that they are materialized to the welfare of Ribatejo (8) and its people.
Applauses of CDS and of some Deputies of PS.
President: - Mr. Deputy I wanted to drive you a solidarity word – I think that will be this the term -, because indeed I know the Patudos House very well and what happened there - few Deputies are acquainted with it - I also know José Relvas' work, his memoirs, and I perfectly know, what this man represent for the Republic implantation in Portugal. Maybe few will know that José Relvas was a man extraordinarily dynamic man during the revolution of the October 5 and a connection agent between the Rotunda and the popular ones that were in Alcântara, therefore a street man, not stopping being intellectual and our diplomatic representative abroad and later minister of the Republic.
Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões can speak for an intervention.
TOURISTIC SECTOR AND THE SOCIAL – POLITICAL DISTURBANCES
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - Mr. President, Messrs Deputies: It seems not to offer doubts that the tourist sector was one of the more affected for the lamentable socio political disturbances that the usurpers of the April 25 provoked to take possession of the Revolution.
Whether the problem of the returned did not exist, the majority of the linked companies to the tourist activity would hopelessly fail. Even we remember for the period of Vasco Gonçalves in charge of Prime Minister efforts were not saved to destroy entirely all the tourist capacity. On the other hand it becomes evident that the Tourism industry constitutes for the time being , one of the only sources of currency value that can maintain a country that, as ours, so much depends on the import and so much needs of currency to pay the essential and indispensable goods to the own feeding. However, new difficulties are raised to the national hostelry, this year uncommonly requested, with such a number of reservations that could originate one of the best tourist years of always.
To this promising perspective is opposed the Parties political piracy that tries, unconscious and criminally, to unchain strikes in the sector, namely among the travel agents. All this, added of the alimentary prices products escalade can unbalance dangerously that were supplied with a year of anticipation, coming to create larger difficulties to the sector and the country yet.
As it is evident, the old-fashioned stability of the prices and the contractual force compromises a condign tourist activity, with competent services, whose dignity becomes indispensable in a essentially tourist country as it is ours.
That the tourism workers of the country are pressed for anticipate the restructuring of the sector, on course of recovering roads, and advance incomportable demands and frustrating of that own recovery, it seems us a crime that goes beyond the simple economy of the country because, firsly, it will reach the own safety of those same workers' work.
The responsible of the tourism in Portugal know that is foreseen to 1977 one of the largest tourist flows of ever and they also know that the threat of strike is enough to divert those who seek peacefulness and are not willing to pay the riot and to disable the period of vacations. Furthermore, it is even natural that the workers, those who really work, choose, o rest, places that at guarantee them peace and peacefulness.
We think that it is perfectly legitimate to debate all and any contract of work. What we condemn is that that debate crosses the sphere of the contracting parties to worsen the country economic situation, that the most conscious seek cost what it may to recuperate.
Europe can look at us with sympathy. The world can desire to help us to maintain the democratic road, but nobody is willing to subsidize the fraud or to help the implantation of totalitarianisms which intend to silt up at a country economically demolish. To move away of us the emigrants' saving and the tourism currencies is clearly suspicious manoeuvre that seeks our ruin and our discredit, creating the ideal field for the performance of a certain people type that, saying to beat for the people, it tries to take by assault the power and to get for itself, the privileges monopoly.
Deficiently supported the tourism industry that seemed to play a fundamental role in the Portuguese economy in the next future, continues to be faced as a tolerated activity. The fragility of the human supports, at official level, doesn't allow to the responsible investors to face calmly enough the daring to new enterprises. The astronomical invested amounts, are early abandoned to their fate we must see the Torralta example and the Tourist Complex in Algarve) and they discourage who wants to work, but it demands safety.
Only for irony I could remember the promises done sometime ago and in special situations that confirmed the arrival of hundreds of tourists of East that would come to spill rubbles and kopecks replacing the tourists that looked for us and carry on happily to seek. But, to speak of these situations is the past and the important is the future.
President, Messrs. Deputies: The enemies from Portugal will have unavoidably of the tourist boom of this year under risk of attend the victory of the democracy and of the freedom, two situations that, in none part of the world, cohabit with Marxism, Leninism, opportunisms and other inferiority complexes that distress the humanity.
Humanism, progress, whatever will concern the man's dignity, they will fight here a battle that is convenient to win .
To abdicate of fundamental positions when minority forces do not restraint of laying hands on all types of tricks to harm the collectivity...
President: - It is finished your time Mr. Deputy.
The speaker: - Thank you very much, Mr. President, I will end.
As I was going to say, it is a crime against the present and against the future.
The tourism will win because we are a free country, visitable by free men...
Laughers.
... or that want to learn how one lives the freedom, from whenever they should come.
That the authorities that in this country have the responsibility of the politics of the work and of the tourism take it into account.
President, Messrs Deputies: It is necessary to cut once and for all and forever all of the paths that discredit the democracy and clear way to the true reaction. And we will only be able to make in peace, in harmony, in work, in productivity and recovering, quickly, open wounds.
That the workers of the tourism are worthy of the profession that they chose and that all the Portuguese receive with dignity and with sympathy the tourists that there come!
Applauses of CDS.
Mr. Gualter Basílio (PS): - It has just spoke the reaction!
President: - Mr Deputy Cunha Simões can speak for an intervention.
A voice of PCP: - There comes the Knight Templar!
HANGER OF BUREAUCRACY
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - No, I’m not going to speak about the Convent of Tomar, but before beginning my intervention he/she would like to say something concerning the interventions that consume the time of this Council.
President: - This problem is finished. I thanked Messrs. Deputies to enter directly in his intervention his intervention.
The speaker: - But, Mr. President, what I have to say is framed in my intervention.
Actually, as Deputy expressly elect for the Portuguese to handle the quit urgent problem of this country...
Laughers....
... I don't think it is fair apply the time that I owe to the tasks of national reconstruction, with attitudes, although praiseworthy, displaced of our mission; in equal way the working hours in any factory can only be correctly usedin the work and in the production...
Manifestations of displeasure of PCP.
... I think that us, Deputies, we should think about this seriously. It is that, actually, if in the factories cannot be done plenary, also here, in this assembly, the national subjects should be dealt as it should be...
Laughers.
... it is not damaging the Portuguese People that we will improve the situation of the country...
New manifestations of displeasure of PCP
... I am under the impression that the Deputies of the communist bench are maybe the only ones satisfied with the political situation in the country.
Protests of PCP.
President: - Attention Messrs. Deputies.
The speaker: Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: The hanger of bureaucracy that is manifested to foreigners and Portuguese in the bordering positions and in the Portuguese customs it is evident proof that we are not still a free country.
Dispersed and busy with smaller surveillances, we have a horde of employees bet in avoiding that the anises of el Mono try the invasion of Portugal.
Parallel, the first image of this Country, that it is wanted of tourism is of mean of who leaps for joy to delouse piece for piece the interior clothes of who goes past them.
Laughers
You can laugh but it is true!
If we want to be coherent we will must to agree that it is not to search pocket for pocket that we’ll hold pretext to excuse to excuse the squandering of the national treasure.
Mr. Lino Lima (PCP): To be coherent, the best is to use DDT!
Laughers.
The speaker: - Messrs. Deputies will still end to go past the shame of being the first politician retired without ever having made anything for the revolution.
Laughers.
To rate in 35 euros each Portuguese that left is to dig deep the secrecy channels and to put before precaution who has values to protect.
If we want to invert this whole situation it is enough we want to do to be born a prosperous Country for anybody remove a cent of the gold that is retrieved.
With all this, our borders are, in Europe, repression paradigm, making to remind in everything the tabernacles of the European communism.
It is pressing to give up the hands of the Portuguese a society that knows how to live together with the other people.
It is urgent to give up entirely the compounds of ridiculous surveillance that not even contribute to a relative social security.
It is urgent to give in the hands of the Portuguese the decisions that can take this country to the normality and the prosperity. It is urgent to create, among us, a trust atmosphere that, by itself, be an effective stopper to the exports of currency value, to the capital flights, to the dilapidation of the Portuguese patrimony.
To transform the country in an immense colony of watchmen and watched it is degrading and not even it is useful.
Useful, yes, it would be the transfer of this effort to endow the Banks through this country of an effective system of anti-robbery that avoids over and over assaults, with the almost certainty that the crime will compensate.
But, we have more yet; as it was not enough touching, scouting out, the long of automobiles, the enormous waiting, the losses of time and patience, it comes into the bargain, the filling up of the inevitable forms destined to hypothetical files and to gathering it of data that nobody asks and that can be for everything less to get better the services that stay to get better unalterable as in fact almost all that, which in this country was able to in fact improve the conditions of the life of the Portuguese.
We need frontier posts, more dynamic, more useful, less bureaucratized, freer, more intelligently organized, more integrated in a free Europe that abates borders gradually.
Laughers of Deputy Victor Louro (PCP)
The speaker: - I didn't know the parrots laughed.
President: Messrs. Deputies, I ask for your attention for the intervention of Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões.
The speaker: - The subject we have been handling is in reality very pressing when we are before scarce weeks of new avalanche of tourists, which, yes, come in search of the original and unknown country that we have been promising for along time. So that the disillusion doesn't begin as soon as the entrance would be good that they found less bolted doors than those that the actual regime inherited from the old and it maintains religiously.
I am sure that the time of the good sense is approaching. Let us speed up their arrival. It is for the good of all, for the good of this Country, for our children's good.
President: - For an intervention Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões can speak.
THE DISILLUSIONS
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: The problem that I bring here today is peak of a lot of disillusions. I can add that those disillusions are extended all over the country: from the closing of agencies of the Bank of Portugal in the province, that nobody understood the criteria that presided, but that resulted in a huge local damage, never counterbalanced with the equilibrium of the national finances, to the promised subsidized housing and desired by all.
The house lack is such that it is we attend true dramas, above all for the youths that want to constitute family.
In the field of the teaching, we become aware of the role of the University, the abandonment of the installation of the polytechnic Schools and the degradation of the High schools. Our highways are 30 thousand kilometres holes. Quite modern industrial units, where the State intervened, are abandoned and deteriorating, as for example the Saint Iria mosaics factory, where 35 thousand euros deteriorate without advantage for anybody.
And the least we can say about this case it is that it is a harm-economy crime and harm-homeland, due to the huge moral damages and materials that it is provoking.
The City halls, now chosen, continue deprived of money and perfectly inoperative.
The investments ceased everywhere and the hunger and the unemployment give the bad fruits of always.
Lisbon continues to be the great safe of the tributes of the country.
This is not to live in democracy, nor it is to live honestly. This is not to govern democratically, nor to govern honestly.
The Country needs a decisive dynamization command!
Of course we cannot be constructing everything in one day, but we cannot wait for ever too.
President, Messrs. Deputies: In the field of the Health we continue to attend eccentric and unfathomable manoeuvres, those that make me promise to the Municipal Assembly of Tomar, of which I am member, and to the population that quite filled the room of the sessions, the corridor and the staircases of the City hall, that I would bring hear to the Parliament their concerns and their unshaken decision.
But let’s see the facts: The population of Tomar was forced to defend in the street his hospital. However, we mourn for to be given to the self-defence of his her supporting connotations and, in the moment, without any practical results, because the sectarian fight which as excuse a hospital, indispensable to this municipality, forgets that it is not legitimate to discuss and to refute essential goods to a population whose weakness can only embarrass the leaders elect democratically, whatever the party they represent.
The CDS that fights, from always, for the order and for the good-sense, believes that, cases of this nature, should be contested vigorously before the populations see forced to do to work masses apparatus in defence of their legitimate interests.
Here, in this same one place, I alerted, in due time, the Assembly of the Republic for the degradation of the goods of the municipality of Tomar, systematically dilapidated before the indifference of these who have for mission defend the interests of the people of the area.
The people of Council Tomar, that has been giving civism example, claimed the sacred right of defending a patrimony that belongs him and without which is not possible a worthy life.
The sauciness and the shamelessness in the past were so big that even the river wanted to remove to the city and Municipality. When that happened the population came out to the street organized and in all, and the beautiful Nabão (41), meets there today, yet.
The history seems comical, but it is true and took place few years ago.
Today, after the April 25, when we believed there to be a life improvement in all the fields, the situation worsened. Let’s see. The Polytechnic Institute, created by the decree – law nº. 402-73 was not institutionalized. The Railway-road Station, whose project was approved and whose construction was enrolled in the Master budget of the State of 1974, disappeared. The remodelling of the General Barracks was so substantial that it abandoned definitively Tomar. The buildings of the Preparatory School will never be raised again. The Garbage and Sewers Treatment Station is gone down through the pipe.
Laughers.
The Water supply to the whole municipality continues with snail step. The Bank House Mendes Godinho and the Bank of Portugal Agency of the Bank of Portugal got out, harming not only the area but also the bordering councils. The Monuments are in pitiful state.
President, Messrs. Deputies: let us be coherent and fair: downgrade the Institutions, to annul them or to let degrade them the largest indifference is revealed by the life conditions in an area! Life Conditions that all would want better and more human.
The case of the Tomar Hospital is common flag to which cannot be indifferent the users of the area, independently of Parties, of militancy or even of political indifference.
It is steady purpose that we won't abdicate of the Tomar District Hospital and we wanted be more and more accomplished to attend in the disease, not only in the city, but in the whole municipality.
The accommodations of the Tomar Hospital delegate to the people by Manuel de Matos, are in reality of the people and they constitute inalienable property.
The CDS in the area of Tomar it will defend uncompromiselingly the whole patrimony of this city and of this council, always with order, but always with energy, so that nobody thinks to spoil us through our weakness.
Applauses of CDS.
President: - Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões can speak for an intervention.
TO TEACH IT IS NECESSARY TO PLEASE
President, Messrs. Deputies: I think of elementary justice to bring to this Council a subject that already for several times was presented me by parents and teachers and that it involves the process of the scholarly construction to primary level of education.
From the famous schools of Open Plan, elaborated without a correct pedagogic statement and where it is necessary to improvise walls with cases to the light lack, without excluding the total absence of school material, here is the shocking panorama in a sector and in a society that begins by asserting that the child should be the most privileged.
I explain here, that in the schools Open Plan, also known by schools P3, the plan is so open, that the thieves prefer them and use "to plunder" the heaters and the stoves of those same schools. Still, to help those schools of Open Plan working, at least, there is a year and a half, two years, without light. They are so open, so open that the competent services think the light of the day is enough to illuminate teachers and pupils.
In spite of the primary teachers' wage not being famous, still to join all this there are many cases that the cleaning staff personal remuneration comes from there as the competent services don't destine it to the schools in due time, if they end for destining.
Ridiculously, unexplainable, abusively great part of the responsibilities with the primary education is supported by the very poor City halls that, some better and other worse, they are doing what they can and as they can.
Concerning that, having spoken here to Mr. President of the City hall of Oeiras, precisely of a school, the school n. º 3 of Damaia, he dealt immediately with the matter; simply the school n. º 3 of Damaia continues without light yet.
As it is evident, an uniformity of criteria will end up for being subject to the power economic of each municipality districts which, as it is known, it differs broadly amongst themselves.
The schools continue uncomfortable so, so insipid, so little attractive as thirty years before.
The Portuguese school, at primary level, ignored that even in this country everything changed. And to teach, it is necessary to please.
On the other hand it is distressing to observe the schools that serve the teaching village level; reduced to four walls and a ceiling and where the children eat outdoors, under the rain and the sun.
In my area, in my District, there are schools where it rains inside as if they had a broken umbrella covering them, I mention the examples of Águas Belas and Pedreira, to bring to a halt here. There are schools that don't have shelter where the children can eat, because I don't know if you make out, in the rural milieu the children a lot of times eat at the school. As they cannot eat inside, if it is rain, they have to eat under the ran.
Can the Country to be very badly of Finances, but this state of things cannot go on in no way! Don't come to say me that for this there are no competent people or at least capable of applying in the primary education the system of school installations used in Europe by the civilized countries.
Here stands the warning that the Ministry of Education and Scientific Investigation can take advantage, if they want, not forgetting that Portugal cannot both being only Lisbon, and children be susceptible to any discrimination that early begins to mark them and that hardly will leave them for the rest of their life.
Applauses of CDS.
President - is there some explanation request?
Pause
Mr. Deputy Gabriel da Frada can speak.
Mr. Deputy Gabriel da Frada - After his extraordinary pedagogy lesson, I would like to do a very concrete question to Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões.
As his intervention revealed unerringly a traditionalism in the educational processes, precisely for the way as he attacked the schools of Open Plan, I ask him what he attacks is the idea of the schools of Open Plan - and the way as he criticized that idea throws out a hint that is so - or whether, on the contrary are the conditions in which that pedagogic initiative, was created a new progress at level of educational methods, that are wrong.
President: - Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões can answer.
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - Mr. Deputy Gabriel da Frada, is with the utmost pleasure that I answer you.
Actually, I have been traveling through a lot of Open Plan schools.
I was alerted for the existence of those schools during a visit that I did to the complex of Sines, where I saw the first. Then I went to the schools of Pontinha, Damaia, Lagos e Pendão. In all of them the building is beautiful, they have a pleasant aspect and it is new. In fact, it is to register a very interesting aspect, that the fact of there to be closets for the children, when they arrive from home and it is bad weather, to keep the shoes they take off to put on galoshes, what is an outstanding thing in this country, because, no matter how eccentric it seems there are still barefoot people, for I don't understand the existence of those same closets.
But leaving that, I have to tell that, of all the teachers with whom I contacted at this schools, there was not only one that avowed me that he was satisfied with the same ones, not for the fact of they are new, because it pleased them, but because being in contact with each other, nobody get to understand, teachers and students. If one explains a matter, for instance Portuguese and another explains mathematics, it is a terrible confusion.
As the way to expose the subjects is always different from person for person.
Mr. Gabriel da Frada (PSD): - May I interrupt you Mr. Deputy?
The speaker: Please, Mr. Deputy Gabriel da Frada. It will be a pleasure to hear you.
Mr.Gabriel da Frada (PSD): We are already cleared up on your image of the Open Plan Schools, for the question is very simple: do those teachers have formation, are they specialized in this teaching type?
The speaker: Mr. Deputy Gabriel da Frada likes so much of the Open Plane plan that seems closed to the idea that I am suggesting. Actually, those people are not formed for that. You are right when you raise me that question, but I would like you indicate me how many people, in this country, are formed to give classes in such a school. If you don't mind, do answer now to this question: how many are, which are and where is those people in order I, in contact with them, to know your opinion.
Mr. Gabriel da Frada (PSD): Mr. Deputy makes a visit to Sintra and see the School of Dr. Nabais.
President: - For an intervention Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões can speak:
THE FIREMEN CORPORATIONS
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): Mr. president, Messrs. Deputies: The firemen's corporations are in Portugal just what they were a hundred years ago; a humanitarian adventure of good men whose generous intentions don't find in the State compensation in supplying of appropriate means to accomplish the meritorious mission they proposed to the Community's service.
Eternally volunteers and eternally abandoned, the Portuguese firemen continue to see this country burn whenever the fire decides to attack our trees and our houses without measures are taken, without, by the State, theoretical guarantee of the lives and goods, are proportionate them equipment conditions and technical preparation corresponding to the generosity with that they assist.
However, the fire danger, best saying, the fire imminence, of accident, has multiplied lately in high degree.
It is distressing to verify that the passage of the car of the bomb and of the yellow helmets is reduced to little more than the simple manifestation of Folklore. In spite of everything, good men continue risking their lives in defence of their fellow creature. Men that, for if they venture unselfishly to want to defend the rights of everybody were entitled to other life conditions and a best and a more and worthier adventure.
The service of fires in Portugal is not, but it should be, faced as a subject of collective safety that was not at the mercy of the fellow creatures charity.
Although it seems a lie, the firemen in Portugal live mainly from the generosity. They have to beg the favour to let them accomplish an altruistic and worthy mission.
It is supposed mistakenly that the only mission that would be asked to the fireman is related with the fire, forgetting that from the door of which we got lost the key, to the animal in difficult situation, everything is reason to call the firemen at once.
Without staining the humanitarian ideal and the traditional shine that encourages it each Peace soldier, it becomes primary that the Government takes care of this significant handful of good wills, endowing them of technique and of material that gives them possibility to contribute effectively to the civil safety, for the common wealth and for the peace in general.
It is fundamental to face situations that can solve the problem of the firemen at the whole country level and not only in Lisbon.
The military service rendered in firemen's corporations, of a number of young men that should guarantee an effective capacity accomplishment would be one of the most positive steps endowing wide layers of the population at the same time with grounds and techniques of safety.
A voice of CDS: - Very well!
Speaker: - The compulsory nature of including staffs technically prepared at level of great companies could obviously avoid risks and losses that a lot complain, but nobody seems to want to avoid.
The integration of the fireman's personality in the everyday of the great and small Portuguese cities and of the inhabitants of the rural and forest areas is imposes as a measure that can obviate to the high damages that the Country yearly suffers.
It becomes convenient that the civil aeronautics or the Portuguese Air force create support structures that can guarantee the benefits of an equipped Air force of the largest effectiveness in a fire to forests or cultures in case of fire.
In the same way we call the attention for the fires on board of ships, as in our coast other more hypothesis doesn't remain than to burn completely.
Thus, relatively to this problem, I want to call Mr. President's and Messrs. Deputies attention for what can happen in our coast with an oil tanker. This because, supposing that he collides and begins to burn, we don't have means to put down the pollution that will disperse immediately along the whole Portuguese coast.
Therefore, no matter how much we forget this facto - and I contacted with the Battalion of Sappers Firemen, where all of the information on these subjects were rendered me - it is a reality that, possessing the Battalion an effective of 750 men, in case of accident, as what behind referred, those men would be impotent to avoid that such catastrophe fell über us.
Actually, the inspector of the south area, Colonel Teixeira Coelho, and Dr. Vítor Melícias, putting me aware of these facts, they showed me the serious danger that one can run in a situation of these. On the other hand, still in relation to the firemen that are not properly volunteers - the Sappers -, they struggle with lacks of a lot of kinds, although their equipment no longer it what one can call a bad equipment. However, those lacks can become worse in the future, because the difference that exists, for instance, between a subchief and a firemen chief it is minimum and it doesn't compensate that the subchief was moved up to chief and continue to give all his support to the Battalion of Sappers Firemen. It is, therefore convenient that these subjects are seen and that we don't restrain only to praise the Corporations of Firemen and them own.
I also had opportunity of visiting Firemen Lisbonian's accommodation, where I observed the whole range of decorations attributed them - from the Torre e Espada (Tower and Sword) to the Ordem de de Cristo (Christ's Order). In that visit I was guided by Mr. Alberto Ribeiro, that gave me all the information on what there happened, and what is true - told me the treasurer - it is that, with a small budget of Lisbon Municipality, they would solve their problems. However that budget many times doesn't appear.
Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: Fed up with words and of good promises, the firemen need now aid, in an effective way, ready and worthy, so that effectively they can contribute to the safety of what we all are entitled.
It is always better to take care of the firemen than to lament the deaths, the wounded, and the material losses, as it is made year after year, promising for soon the improvement of the situation without be given a step, without nothing be made, miserably shrunk and unbelievers of our capacity to accomplish.
The firemen, giving everything, ask little and they would be entitled to demand we gave them a minimum of conditions and an organic structure they already despair of seeing sanctioned, in spite of it has been proposed a long time ago. In these terms, Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies I request that the Government, through the Ministry of the Administration, inform this Assembly of the destiny of the Draft of Restructuring elaborated by the National Commission of Restructuring of the Services of Fires handed over there is already a lot of time.
Applauses of CDS
Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões can speak for an intervention.
THE ESTORIL COAST
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: There is no doubt that the Tourism industry has been basing, among us, in a half dozen of key-points that not always have been deserving of the competent authorities the due treatment.
It is in this case the Costa do Sol (Sun Coast) [today Costa of Estoril (Estoril Coast)], that can be considered the pioneering area of the tourism in Portugal.
In this point, and in others, I Believe that it is time of organize our tourism beyond the improvisation that characterizes the tourist accomplishments from yesterday and from today.
The Costa of Estoril (Estoril Coast) is considered, all over the world one of the most privileged in, one of the most privileged places of the nature. To attest it, since times very very old and in different historical times, there we will find complete royal families that chose it as the best, after the lost Homeland.
Besides Estoril Coast has been straight off, as a child’s play, without reserves or conditions, pure and simply abandoned, both, by official entities and users that forget naively that the area of Estoril Coast is one of the areas to preserve in this country if we want, actually, to have a country, a viable country, a Country of future.
The activities plan for 1978 and elaborated by the Committee of Tourism of Costa of Estoril is a document that deserves our best attention, because it emerges of the vulgarity, moving forward proposed techniques and socially advisable.
The hope returned. The initiatives are on the march. We have to impede they didn’t stay eternally in the paper.
So, in the “Brief characterization of the local tourism and its evolution" is confirmed that, in spite of this area to be vacationed for external tourism, it is far away from being classified as centre of international tourism and it presents reasons such as lack of lodging, amusement reasons that continue to be practically the same of twenty years ago, the beaches are polluted; the newspaper "A Luta", of May 17, 1978, brought even the picture of a collector transporting all types of debris, that disembogues in Carcavelos and that it is one more of the alert thousands have been thrown about the possibility of the beaches of Estoril Cost to reach such a degree of pollution that nobody could use them any more.
The unconsciousness, the indifference, the slowness with that these problems are dealt would be crime if we didn't know the mentality of the Portuguese people, his goodness and hope that tomorrow everything will be solved.
But tomorrow is today! And or all the Portuguese lay hands on this Country, or this country will start to be a pollution focus at European level.
If the Portuguese don't take care of their beaches, of the cleaning and embellishment of their houses, of the cleanliness of the cafes and restaurants, of the streets where the garbage gathers, soon we won't have a country, but a dunghill on the edge of the sea planted!
Laughers.
Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: I return go back to Estoril Coast and the Plan done in 1978, which I consider very suitable and that I hope that it doesn’t stand forever in the paper. And it is good that, just as there it is said, the Committee of Estoril Coast becomes a dynamization organ, putting an end once for all to its bureaucratized structure and unadapted to this century, never forgetting, however, that ding away with the bureaucracy is not to anarchize as so often, and on these last four years, it was proceeded at so many places.
In the actions in the sphere of the infrastructures the Plan points out to the creation of a Congresses Palace, a Museum of Infantile Art, an Automobile Museum, the urgent exploitation of the Estoril spa, the study of the grottos of Cascais and Alapraia, the construction of warm swimming pools in Parede, S. Pedro and in other places to study conveniently, the construction of a marina, the valorization and maximum use of the beaches and direct connections between the Airport and Cascais.
Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: The plan of the Estoril Coast Committee of Tourism appears as a correct and loyal coordination with the local organs of Tourism of Sintra, Lisbon and Oeiras...
President: - Mr. Deputy, please you should abbreviate as your time is already finished.
The speaker: - Thank you very much, Mr. President, but, if you should give me permission for more a little time… only the indispensable to fill some fragments in white…
Laughers
President: Very well Mr. Deputy, but the time of these interventions was strictly established.
The speaker: - Of course, Mr. President. I will end in a very little while.
I was saying that the plan of Tourism of the Estoril Coast Committee points out for a correct and loyal coordination with the local organs of Tourism of Sintra, Lisbon and Oeiras, areas of different characteristics, but complementary in the tourist field. On the other hand, it calls up the idea of a nucleus of purchases, a plan of physical disposition inventorying the tourist resources. As foundation of everything a medium term Plan up to 1983, instead of the inefficient annual plans.
In the actions on the animation-fixation, animation-attraction the Plan included already the structured international courses, the music Festival, the exhibitions, the industrial arts Fair, the Experimental Theatre of Cascais and the support to the local initiatives, although the criteria of attribution of subsidies have to be circumspectly thought for not to redound in financings to the mediocrity.
In the field of the promotion, the Plan is once again realist shown and lifts themes as the own name of Estoril Coast, the exhibitions and national and international weeks, the collaboration with countries of complementary tourism, the publicity, the public relations and the sales promotion.
Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: For the defeatists, for the sceptics and for the unable, this Tourism Committee plan, signed by his president of the same, Dr. Licínio Alberto of Almeida Cunha, will seem ambitious, utopian and unrealistic, but for those that have a head on his shoulders they accept him/it as possible, urgent and viable in all of its aspects.
It doesn't seem exaggerate to ask the Tourism Secretary of State to have the analyzed and put in execution urgently with a view to the tourist ranging of this area and the systematic use of its potentialities twelve months a year
The area needs, actually, a Plan, at short term that can guide the private activities, with a view to the establishment of new companies of appropriate and dimensions located in suitable place.
But the area also needs a medium term Plan to include neighbours gradually with tourist interest, that can rethink bottom subjects and eyes worried with a society more and more concerned with the free times.
The Estoril Coast Tourism Committee already has that Plan, let’s go to give it all our support to cement the Country that we must leave to the coming generations.
Applauses of CDS.
Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões can speak for an intervention.
A voice of PCP: There comes the wine of Cartaxo!
THE HUNT AND THE ECOLOGICAL BALANCE
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies:
The general slaughter of the hunt should have this year its epilogue if there is not enough courage to put it immediately an end.
The Portuguese man doesn’t respects neither the nature nor its inhabitants and instead of protecting hem defend, and foment the development of the hunting species, the "huntsman", in a selfishness all done of ignorance and of rapaciousness, he behaves as the worst predators, not respecting either regulations, or reserves that should be uncompromisingly preserved. On the other hand, the fiscalization is null or inoperative.
This Country is to losing the sense of the authority and the "authority" avoids to displease, to reprehend or to punish the transgressors because this way they make best of both worlds, although he forgets deliberately that, with his apathy and his indifference, he is serving very badly the community and contributing for the unbalance of the Nature when enabling the fauna and flora destruction.
The Nature cannot be forced! The man when doing it contributed dynamically to his own destruction.
This small preamble comes to call the Government's attention and it is also an appeal to the civic coherence of all those that get hunt licenses, and don't have other thought than killing indiscriminately whatever moves.
Laughers.
This intervention still has as purpose to alert the public powers so that the hunt to the partridge and the hare is suspended immediately, because of the species are disappearing so quickly, that in 1979 they will stop existing if these measures are not taken.
The hunt is a Nature Patrimony and nobody, even the State nor the hunters can claim the right of calling themselves their proprietors.
Mr. Manuel Alegre (PS): - very well!
The speaker: - However, it is to the State that competes to administer, inside of its territory, and to administer well, to it safeguards of wild species because of the uncultured man to abuse of the Nature that offers him everything abundantly, but that doesn’t allow either abuses or needless violence.
The State must guarantee the "seed" able to procreation that guarantees the continuity. The hunters should only be entitled to the surpluses. And it is good, and it would be excellent that the radio, the television and the newspapers should made echo of these plane truths, but that become so important for an ecological balance in this Country so needy of good-sense.
Knowing us that a lot of species are endangered, not only the hunt species, but many other too, and also knowing the causes go from the modifications of the environment, which lead to precarious conditions of habitat, the pollution - and it is known how the pesticides have been contributing for to instant shortage on the insectivores birds - the well-known increment of the number of hunters, which should be quoted around the 400 thousand, and their gathering in the hunt lands, the development of the transports that allows fast trips of the hunters the quite sophisticated and precision of the hunt stuff, etc. etc..
Before this situation and due, as said behind, to the hunters' gathering, we are attending in our country to the destruction of the partridges and hares.
Exemplifying: If in a certain area where there are 100 or two hundred partridges are concentrated 300 or 400 hunters, it is to reduce to these birds all and any defence possibility and the reality that leads to the solid destruction: the infamous genocide that the human being, said intelligent, will produce on the irrational, that should be caressed and protected.
Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: All the hunters of the areas to whom I have been speaking complain about the growing decrease of the number of partridges in the whole Country.
And I repeat: the shortage, that in the current year is alarming, puts in danger the future of the hunting species, with special relief for the partridge and for the hare. And we shall not want that, just as it happened with the goat of Gerês, real and evident testimony of our carelessness and for our shame, happen the same to the partridge and the hare.
I don't know if we will avoid the extinction of the mentioned species, but so that at least we try it, I propose:
a) Close immediate, under shelter of the effective law, of the hunt to the partridge and the hare in the whole national territory that allows to save the " remainder" of these hunting species.
b) Immediate Structuring of a new hunt law, without privileges, but that avoids hunters' agglomerates and regulates the slaughtering of the excess of the "seed."
In order to reach this purpose we should bend our steps to the road of the conditioned hunt, that is, social and tourist hunt areas where all can hunt; not only a certain number of hunters a day, but also regulating the killing in relation to the density of the species and supervising these areas conveniently.
Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: although the regulation and stood surveillance on the law of the hunt is urgent, quite urgent is that it finishes at once the permission of the hunt to the hare and the partridge.
To the hunters, the whole Portuguese people, I ask that they see in this appeal an afflicted scream, for defence of an albeit thoughtlessly insist on destroying.
The hare and the partridge if they be totally eliminated as it is foreseen, continuing the annihilation encoded since the beginning of this month and last Sunday of December, they will be one more example of as the Portuguese insist on self-destruction when destroying their survival means.
Of this bench, I apply for the Secretary of State of the Agriculture and the General – Director of the Forest Services, that, right off heard the Venatical Commissions, one closes the hunt immediately to the partridge and the hare.
Applauses of CDS and of some Deputies of the PS and PSD.
President: Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões can speak.
TO THE ARTISTIC AND CULTURAL PATRIMONY LACKS AN AESTHETIC, CULTURAL AND OF THE LANDSCAPE VALUES SYSTEMATIC INVENTORY AND AN ETHNOGRAPHY SURVEY YET.
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: Before beginning my intervention, I wanted to say to Mr. Deputy Manuel Dias that, as a matter of fact, the problem of the Ribatejo’s (8) Beach bridge, over the Tagus was sometime ago overseen by me, having contacted the Barquinha and Constança councils on this subject. I am under the impression that is in progress and for that let’s hope that the bridge will be not destroyed in behalf of another that stands there.
Mrs. Ercíia Talhadas (PCP): - And the people’s money?
The speaker: On this matter, lady Deputy, the truth is that I walk to and fro to treat the subjects of the people. (laughers of PCP) I am not here to lose time, as Messrs. Deputies use to do; I am not here to spend hours and hours to the Portuguese People without giving him anything in change, Mrs. Deputy. In fact, I was giving an explanation to Mr. Deputy Manuel Dias.
President: Mr. Deputy, please do your intervention.
The speaker: I just wanted to answer to that Mrs. Deputy, so nice, but that is not fond of me.
General laughers.
Mrs. Ercíia Talhadas (PCP): - You hit the mark.
The speaker: - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: I enter now into my intervention.
It is known that all of the periods of social convulsion represent serious danger for the artistic and even patrimony, in many cases, for the cultural patrimony of a people.
It can be said that in that aspect what is taking place in Portugal, in the last four years, it is really dramatic for the inheritance that, in this aspect, was transmitted us and we obliged ourselves to transmit to the coming ones. Indeed, it is incontestable that we continue without reviewing and modernize the incomplete classification of monuments considered national and considered properties of public interest. We continued without a systematic inventory of the artistic values, panoramic and cultural.
Valuable files of the autarchies, of the public institutions and even private ones owe matters that are pasture of the flames or junk-dealer material.
It was not done, and possibly it will never be done, an ethnographic that fastens certain states of the Portuguese culture, indispensable to understand ourselves as people. There is a diploma that obliges to the conservation of the files of the Portuguese companies with more than 20 years without however have been created any service of Inspection and collect of that documentation where its destruction is supervised.
Our cultural offices of State are full of people that little does, limiting Portugal to the area of the city of Lisbon where they work and inhabit
Mr. Manuel Dias (PS): Very well!
The speaker: in Tomar the first exhibition of industrial archaeology has been done, demonstrative that the technology entered with determination in its Historical phase, becoming fundamental to organize it in that sense.
However, everyday it is destroyed and it is sold for the scrap only matchless exemplars of machines that suited to conserve and to integrate in the Portuguese cultural patrimony.
Mr. Carlos Robalo (CDS): Very well!
The speaker: - The museology is decisive in the organization of the permanent education, of the tourism and in other forms of social organization of vital importance for our country.
As it is evident, we intend these subjects are dealt by State offices of national extent, with support capacity in any Portuguese province or autonomous area.
It is convenient that decision of great consequence and of decisive importance are taken in the field of the Culture for they are safeguarded of the underutilization by departments, barracks, storehouses, hospitals, mendacity asylums, the many convents and monasteries sold by public auction in the middles of last century. It is convenient to finish once for all with this situation, giving to such buildings condign culturally and socially missions.
There are cases in that the slow dereliction of the sub utilization was simultaneous with the disappearance of the works of restoring and preservation, transforming many of these constructions in ruin heaps, as it is the case of S. Francisco's convent, in Tomar, quite mutilated for the barracks utilization works, in that was transformed, soon after the extinction of the Orders and nowadays well-nigh to collapse for conservation dearth.
All of the local diligences to avoid a disrespect of this nature, have result fruitless owing to the bureaucracy and traditional excuses: lack of budgets, waits for ruling, interest on the part of the Army, etc.
All over the Country the monuments are abandoned and despised, physically in accelerated destruction.
As I already here once asserted they don't have guards, or cicerones, or any protection of the species.
Christ's Convent is an example of among many others, without this means that the rest of the country is well or even that there are not quite more serious cases; very well, in what we consider the house-mother of the Portuguese art, it stews the neglectfullness and the disregard to what everything is doomed. A precarious electric installation threats a part of the building that can at every moment to be wiped out by the flames. The roofs are much damaged, the windows rotten and destroyed, the floors decaying by the infiltrations, the slow corroding of the foundations of great part of the infiltrated building of waters of the cisterns, are more than signs of pain screams that ruffle and that competes us to extinguish.
The recent presence of a group of returned that there have been lodging for absolute space lack in another more suitable place of the city caused the normal of a forced utilization of places that would deserve immediately completes repairing.
Mr. Carlos Robalo (CDS): - Very well!
The speaker: - The collections of tiles, extremely important for the history of that type of decorations in Portugal, are those who more suffered with sub utilizations of this kind, that urges to banish so fast as possible and radically of the life of our monuments.
Indeed, the Centre of the Country, contains dwelling nucleus of uncommon architectonic interest with marks of relevant housing, that should force to its immediate classification and future orientation so as to maintain its design and its beauty. In this case are Pedreira's populations, Vila Velha de Ourém, Golegã, part of the city of Tomar, Olalhas, etc.
But nothing of this is to admire whether the fact will be compared with the total destruction of the archive of the Police of Coimbra, sold to the junk-dealer by a progressist commander of this one, that so ordered to destroy, in his criminal ignorance, among others, the archives of the extinct convents of the area of Coimbra, collected in due time in that corporation and conserved up to 1975.
Until today we have not been reported that had been asked responsibilities, nor at least open that inquiry that never anybody knows as how it is closed.
Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: It was convenient that the General office of the Culture had own life, own and independent budget. This way, it could be asked for responsibilities and to demand work.
We should say in behalf of the truth, that at least in the last two years passed through the Culture General office managers of proven qualities that only didn’t accomplish more because the bureaucratic machine didn't let them.
The April 25, which surprisingly is based in respectable principles of larger consideration for the Portuguese culture, was done to foment the culture and the defence of the patrimony. Actually, little or nothing has been done for these aspects, but to be hollow babbling or inoperative legislation.
We are sure that it won't continue to be so, and if for that will be necessary don’t be afraid: rise up urgently the Culture Ministry.
Applauses of CDS.
President: Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões can speak.
LACK OF SUPPORT TO OUR TECHNICIANS
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: Integrated in the Eventual Commission of Solidarity to the Victims of the Floods and Storms I had opportunity to verify once again, in the middle of the Marshland, as the Portuguese technicians are alone after finishing the courses and they rush in the job market.
Actually, the slowness with that we sent our technicians for the most advanced centres in the world and the incapacity of demanding them the results of the apprenticeships are responsible for our delay, in all fields that depend on the investigation and on an experience that we never had. Ribatejo (8) is on agriculture a victim of our technicians' incompetence, unable to raise and to consolidate ditches on that dominate the harms of the floods.
Even in the dredging of the sands our technicians are unable, in efficient terms, of answering to the needs of the country.
Mr. Vital Moreira (PCP): - No approbation!
The speaker: - Although Mr. Deputy Vital Moreira doesn't support, the truth is that I went to the Marshland, I contacted the technicians that are to work and they told me exactly what I have just referred. There is a Dutch technician, to guide the services, that is going to leave in the end of this month and they don't know how to continue with the work. In other words, when a dredging is made there is a payment of hours precisely to contractors, that it is calculated in the amount of 16 thousand escudos (29), that is never verified, because the technicians don't know to deal with that and so they never know whether the contractors take time more or less than the necessary and if, actually, they are to working fit or not. And that is important, although Messrs. Deputies say that this is not true. But, indeed, that is even so.
To think that we are the best cannot have my agreement and it is beyond belief that we can say it differently than by irony.
A small portion of the thousands of escudos (29), with that we corrected the catastrophe, result in the appearance among us professionals able of avoiding it largely.
This that I am just saying is also true for the teaching, for the medicine, for the house, for the highways, for the fishing, for the shipbuilding, etc.
To worse the negative effects of the situation we have the few competent technicians' bad use, which we have among us, whose knowledge is not applied, provoking a lot of times a total disbelief on the part of those that remained here and even they don’t dream about the message that the youths bring them.
The courage to give importance and competences to the renewed technicians is linked to the remodelling of the system of grants, of reports, of minimum time of work for the State on the part of those who specialize at the cost of the public money.
Most of our Universities are holes of mistaken fossils with the educational process.
Mr. Vital Moreira (PCP): - No approbation!
The speaker: - Although the Mr. Vital Deputy Moreira says that doesn't support, the truth is that that is like this.
Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: It is fundamental to look over and modernize the technicians' access, of all of the specialties, to the foreign centres and, in the same way, create conditions for post - academic courses in Portuguese centres, a lot of times no stimulated or completely forgotten for our students' and technicians improvement.
It is necessary that those technicians are endowed with a premature preparation that allows them to profit 100% the effort and the money that the Country invests in them.
It is necessary that their knowledge are recognized and applied without bureaucracies, impediments, nor envies.
It is necessary, on the other hand, to end with the scientific-tourist grants that only discredit us and impede a reorganization of this sector, of vital importance for the national economy, - this "vital" one was not referred to the Mr. Vital Deputy Moreira, as it is obvious!
Laughers.
The endemic crisis and the poverty of this Country demand a correct and immediate reorganization of the work that, of course, is the growing wealth and generous distribution to the whole, thirsty of progress and welfare, Portuguese people.
Applauses of CDS.
President: - Mr. Deputy Sousa Marques can speak.
Mr. Sousa Marques (PCP): - I just want to give an explanation to the Assembly, Mr. President.
Undeniably, Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões is member of the Eventual Commission of Solidarity to the Victims of the Floods and Storms, recently set up in this Assembly, but in that quality he cannot speak in this hemicycle. And, in this sense, the words we have just heard are of the exclusive responsibility of Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões and of the Parliamentary Group where he is integrated and they cannot be considered as to take up a position of the referred Commission, as this one didn't confer him any mandate for that and, therefore he doesn't have any responsibility in such statements.
I think that this explanation was owed, because Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões's first words were misleading when he said "As member of the Commission, etc., etc."
So I believe that the explanation is given, naturally and defend the Commission of the statements that here were done.
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - I catch the speaker’s eye, Mr. President.
President: - Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões, as there is another Deputy that caught the speaker’s eye, do you want to answer at once or only in the end?
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): I prefer to answer in the end.
President: Mr. Deputy Monteiro can speak.
Mr. Monteiro de Andrade (independent): - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: I desire to give some explanations too, because I thought that Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões, in his intervention, has elaborated a misunderstanding.
I refer to the first part of the already mentioned intervention, when he speaks about the lack and in the Portuguese technicians' incapacity to answer some emerging requests, namely in what it concerns to the drainage work, that has been under way in the area of Ribatejo (8).
There is a misunderstanding here, because I thought that Mr. Deputy stressed that the Dutch technicians that there collaborate when going away didn't leave any Portuguese technician prepared. I should explain that that is not true, because the Assembly of the Republic ratified an agreement done with Netherlands in that it is foreseen, what has been accomplished, the technicians' interchange of apprenticeships and they have been going a lot of Portuguese technicians to Netherlands in order to there acquire knowledge that have been very useful for the desalination and recovery work of the Lezíria Grande (Big Marshland).
Therefore, we already have many prepared technicians and, even that Dutch technicians leave, today is already possible that our technicians are capable to undertake the urgent work of stabilization of the soils of the Lezíria Grande (Big Marshland).The subjects on lands drainages of are not complicated technical subjects and, therefore, could and they should have been, there is a long time, solved by the Portuguese technicians that have capacity for such.
President: Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões can speak.
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): Mr. Deputy Sousa Marques, actually, I didn't know that to speak in this hemicycle had to ask authorization to your Excellency.
As for the explanation that Mr. Deputy ado gave, I should tell him that I began my exposition referring that I was integrated in the Eventual Commission of Solidarity to the Victims of the Floods and Storms, but I didn't bound the Commission. When I speak here, I speak in my name.
Mr. Vital Moreira (PCP): Happily!
The speaker: - Happily, Mr. Deputy Vital Moreira! Actually, when something has to be said on behalf of the Parliamentary Group is to the management of this that matters do it. When I speak I do it in my name and for that never bond my Party! In the Mr. Deputy's parliamentary group it is that, as everything is regulated, as everything it is linked (laughers of PCP) as it is everything chained, when one speaks, he does it through the "boss’" voice. In my Parliamentary Group that is not alike, because there are no bosses.
Laughers of PCP
Mr. Vital Moreira: - What an idea!
The speaker: For everything that I have just said, Mr. Deputy Sousa Marques, can in fact to be easy that I didn't speak on behalf of the Commission, but in my name. But, if your Excellency, when I will talk about the Eventual Commission of Solidarity to the Victims of the Floods and Storms, wants me to ask him permission and I ask. Mr. Deputy, may I go on?
Laughers.
On the explanations given by Mr. Deputy Monteiro de Andrade, I’ll tell that there is not any misunderstanding. Mr. Deputy referred that an exchange that exists between Dutch and Portuguese technicians, but the truth is that a true exchange doesn't exist, because we are who are going to Holland to learn with them on this subject - of course in other subjects maybe we can help them, but in this matter are they who help us, because they have much more experience than we have. Even the climate conditions they are there much more favourable on behalf of the floods.
This interchange, as Mr. Deputy called it, these of four months apprenticeships that the Portuguese technicians are going to do in Holland are more than insufficient to learn any thing, so that those acquired knowledge are valid for our country.
Actually I spoke to the technicians...
A voice of PCP: - It’s already enough!
The speaker: - Maybe it’s already enough, but it is only more a little while!
As I was saying, I spoke to the Portuguese technicians, they were themselves who set me before these problems and it was for that that I lifted the subject here. And fortunately Mr. Deputy Monteiro de Andrade brings to this hemicycle a problem that is necessary to get up. Like this, I wait that our technicians when they will go to work as trainees abroad they don't make only for four months - that barely arrives for their integration, but at least a year, because that investment that we do will be profitable for our Country.
President: Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões can speak for an intervention.
NATIONAL PRESS
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: It is usually accepted to call to the great diaries and weekly publications National Press leaving to the Regional Press the periodic publications that defend the interests, search and inform inside an area with ethnographical affinities or merely administrative.
The regional press is that whose extent is going from the city of the province to the Municipality and, at most, to the District, hardly ever the vastest area. The regional newspaper will rarely be able to go through more or less extensive periods and, thanks to the specific circumstances, to deserve the interest of a vast area or nation.
It can be said that the regional press is the one that maintains a circulation starting from 1000 copies, can reach 15000, maintaining the structures of a publication of this kind without growth or investments that can, at a short term, to become unbearable.
Unquestionably the pictures of the Regional Press will have to grow in its majority formed by local recruitment and by representatives of significant social strata of the areas.
Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: This way we cannot intend that the Regional Press, in a poor Country of cultural resources, be being the image of greatness of an object that in itself she only is present decreased and full of flaws.
Before the April 25, the information techniques in Portugal were always gagged, much more for the little cultural and education level than for the censorship and other repression forms, only possible before the indifference of a people in a given time.
Be that as it may, it is our Regional Press we are dealing with and not any other, despite its own boundaries and defects; jus the one we intend to improve, dynamize cal and to turn more useful to the society that serves and it was, at least, that the spirit that reigned in the national meeting of the Regional Press which took place in the beautiful and powerful city of Póvoa de Varzim.
Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: the period of journalistic shameless inevitable after half century of censorship, it seems to have reached the end and it is time of setting out seriously, through the Press, the national problems, in the broadest respect for an atmosphere of concord and sociability, to get better more and more. For that every reason, we believe that the public powers must, at this time, to face with energy the restoration of the free and worthy Portuguese Regional Press, of priceless secular traditions.
Thus, it is requested to whom in charge the gradual formation of the stout servants of the Regional Press, whose mission can be deeper and more subtle as our qualification arises its level.
It is probable that with more talented teams we got more useful, more profitable and more skilled newspapers.
Independently of financial aids, it is in the valorisation of the human groups that serve the Regional Press that it seems to live us a concrete and serious plan of endowing the Country of serious and serviceable structures of information. Simultaneously we don't deny the usefulness of economic, fiscal, postal and other facilities although, for duty of conscience, let us increase we don’t want that certain companies, for practicing journalism, come to be privileged in relation to other private sectors, many of them of notable public usefulness and also struggling with enormous difficulties and quite little understanding.
We know that a newspaper well done, attractive, honest and uncompromising defender of the truth and of the Homeland it always ends up for imposing to the crises and the attacks of their opponents.
Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: - We perfectly know that this activity in the Regional Press doesn't hold profits, It gives rise for bitter quarrels, insomnias, headaches and it is swarmed with difficulties and incomprehension.
In this base, it is intended that the Government acts, without creating favouritisms where it is only intended that justice is made without atrophic paternalisms or favour situations.
Here, as everywhere, the criterion the adopt will have to be, unavoidably, the one of the competencies which survive, putting an end once and for all to stratagems of winning money with pseudo journalism that doesn't interest anybody nor it benefits anything. The courage of giving primacy to what has value, to what is well done, to what is worthy, and we will start immediately to have profitability proofs that the readers thank and that the Country pays cheaper.
I think that, in this sense, it was worthwhile the National Encounter of the Regional Press, in Póvoa of Varzim, of which we can extract two conclusions of larger interest: in first place, the moment through what passes the information in Portugal is decisive and it necessitates the maximum support, without breaks and without hesitation. And, second, it is not worthwhile to insist on paternalisms that didn’t result or in domain attempts, of impressive stupidity, to impose totalitarian patterns where it can only fit patriotic interest and regional and local formation.
Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: To finish, a word of a lot of respect and admiration for all those that, with great personal sacrifices, brought to our days the Regional Press always struggling for better and worthier conditions, many of them victims of recent violations of opportunists transformed in a hurry in the leftist vanguard that hides, a lot of times, the flatterers and the worms of the other times.
Applauses of CDS and of some social-democratic Deputies.
President: For an intervention Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões can speak.
THE GYPSY CHILD
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS) - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies. Among the social groups rooted in Portugal that by chance more can complain about social disfavour stand out, without doubt about it, the gypsies.
Without forgetting the due homage to the heroic persistence in the fight for a free and independent life - almost unmatched in the world , I cannot stop lamenting, especially in this moment, the carelessness that the gypsy child has been fated, for which nobody never thought about day-nurseries, maternities, kindergartens, nor nobody wanted to recover and to direct over life.
Voices of CDS - Very well.
The speaker - Here and in the middle of Europe only the contempt for these children of different colour and different race.
It is right that can exist who cynically comments on, that when it is spoken about the child and World Year of the Child nobody intends to exclude the gypsy child, continuing to give it full freedom in order to starve and to grow in the poverty and in the ignorance.
This way, it is evident that, setting out this way, the small gypsies cannot yearn for a normal life, a normal procedure, the respect and obedience to the rules of a society that never knew how to respect that always preferred to punish them. The gypsies' schools were always the prisons. Still, in a Christian society never found too much, the inhumanity with which they were always dealt with and in that they were forced to live.
Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: It is not intended that the charity and the procedures of certain social class force the gypsy to abandon for ever, a secular practice for converting to the monotony and the craziness of our towns and cities. Respecting their adventure spirit and mobility, we asked for the gypsies a treatment not repressive, but fraternal, human and understanding.
Voices of CDS: Very well!
The speaker: Nobody intends to depreciate them, their culture or chain their movements, but only to let them enjoy the benefits of a society ut out to plan with efficiency a better world, much more cultivated and healthier.
Voices of CDS: Very well.
The speaker: It doesn’t dim this Assembly of free men, to greet the lesson of freedom that the gypsies always knew how to give to the world, asking for them understanding and friendship, asking for the gypsy children a different world of peace and love, asking for the old gypsies a resting old age.
Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: Only proceeding this way we can belong only like this to a world that doesn't embarrass us, only so we can live in peace! That it is not only peace the absence of weapons, because it is truly peace the peacefulness of conscience, the fraternity and the love.
Applauses of CDS, of the PS, of PSD and the social-democratic independent Deputies.
THIS ASSEMBLY NEVER HELPED TO GOVERN PORTUGAL
President: - We will begin the debate on the 5th Constitutional Government's program.
I inform the Assembly that to the moment nobody enrolled to intervene yet.
Pause.
Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões can speak.
Mr. Cunha Simões (indep.): - Mr. President, Mr. Prime Minister, Messrs. Members of the Government, Messrs. Deputies: Happily the Country cannot wait much more so that the present political and supporting formations have to report progress to the Nation.
To organize elections when 18% of the Parliament isn’t adherent to any Party doesn't seem unimportant task and it can be the more desired success to this Government, provided that the future of the democracy and of this Country stands in this line and they need clear elections and unequivocal results.
We suppose that the present Government won't have doubts in this exercise, as it pronounces persuaded to dedicate to the vote the best of its attention.
In spite of everything, to guerrilla supporting guerrilla of the political visionaries, caught to supporting structures in ruins, don't lose opportunity, opposing a thousand fight fronts against opponents that always won them the elections.
Whoever the Prime Minister that will come to the present Government there is always who discovers him the leprosy and the ague, even for that they resort to the lie and the slander.
This Assembly never governed Portugal! This Assembly never helped to govern Portugal! This Assembly never left that nobody governed.
Voices of the PS: - Not supported!
The speaker - Not supported, but it is true.
Mrs. Emília de Melo (PS): Not supported, is a lie.
The speaker: It is true, Mrs. Deputy! And your Party has experience of that.
All remember how was dealt with that extraordinary man whose name was Nobre da Costa, victim of the political elementariness of some Portuguese. Then it was Mota Pinto, it from other angles, but with redoubled rant and rave. Now they are the last stones of PSD flung against the Engineer Maria de Lourdes Pintassilgo and against all of the Government's members, which are conscious of the quite ingrate mission to that they were called, in a difficult moment and for a short period. Then I am sure that, even if Christ here came, he must be asked of the money and of the menu of the last dinner.
But Portugal will go on, in spite of having to pass over the political corpse of some irreplaceable ones about whom the history will not speak.
Maria de Lourdes Pintassilgo will govern without miracles nor catastrophes and possibly without the blessing of this Assembly, that never gave nor draw off the virtue to any Government.
For good of Portugal and of the democracy, only desire that the next Parliament belongs to Unfailing defenders of the national interests, although that forces to sacrifice supporting positions.
VOTES OF PROTEST, DECLARATIONS OF VOTE, INTERVENTION OF REVENGE, THE EXIT OF CDS, APPLICATIONS
VOTE OF PROTEST AGAINST NICARAGUA
President: Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões can speak for an intervention.
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - Mr. Deputy António Guterres, in spite of not having heard all your intervention and in spite of not agreeing with the protest vote that Mr. Deputy announced, because of the situation in which live many Portuguese. Instead of fighting for the Portuguese reality continue to worry with the foreign countries in this Council- I say since my vote will always be of abstention and for that it can never be unanimously. (Laughers of the PS) – I’d like to ask you, since you are acquainted with Nicaragua, which cities are those that were destroyed and what is the matter with Nicaragua and all that happened abroad.
Protest of the PS.
Mr. Vital Moreira (PCP): Peevish Reactionary!
The Speaker: The Television and Portuguese Broadcasting, my dear friend, they give us the reality that all of us know.
Protests of the PS and of PCP.
Mr. Vital Moreira (PCP) Mr. President, that is intolerable!
The Speaker: Carry on speaking, Messrs. Deputies. Actually, the red always displeased me. Red only the «tinto» of Cartaxo (Cartacho red wine) and no that that is in front of me.
Protests of the PS and PCP.
Therefore, Mr. Deputy António Guterres, I only was fond of asking you if you know to let me know which those destroyed cities are and what happens in Nicaragua, since I think that the Portuguese Deputies forget the Portuguese reality. It is here, in Portugal, that one suffered and not outside! Messrs. Deputies don't deal either with the Portuguese reality nor care the Portuguese People!
Protests of the PS and of PCP.
Mr. Gualter Basílio (PS): Reactionary!
The Speaker: - Messrs. Deputies, carry on struggling to impresses me but you are not able to.
It was just this question that I intended to do you, Mr. Deputy António Guterres.
President: Mr. Deputy António Guterres can speak to answer, if he desires.
Mr. António Guterres (PS): Mr President, I apologize, I think it is not worth answer to this interpellation.
Applauses of the PS and of PCP.
Mr. Cunha Reis (CDS): - He doesn't know and for that he doesn't answer.
THE HYPOCRISY OF THE VOTES
President: Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões can speak for an explanation.
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - Messrs. Deputies: My position was clarified some days ago on these protests against foreign countries. As a matter of fact, in a country with half millions of unemployed, with hundreds of thousands of returned, with millions of citizens payers of taxes, more and more overloaded and more and more afflicted, I turn confused with which happens here in this Council. And, mainly, when I see to use the hypocrisy through Portuguese Communist Party, that it accepts some protests, it refuses others and makes the game that all of us know.
The Portuguese Communist Party should be actually a Portuguese and no a foreigner one.
Voices of PCP: - Shuts up, provoker!
THE CONFUSION IN THE TEACHING
President: Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões can speak.
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): Mr. Minister, I heard with pleasure your intervention and actually I support you, because the confusion that reigned in the Secondary education and in the University Teaching, in a certain time, it was such that I got convinced that it would be cheaper to the MEIC to sell directly diplomas to offer as gift of birthday than to have the students and the teachers there.
Laughers.
Actually, I never understood how it was possible to dismiss individuals because they taught Fascist Physics, Fascist Anatomy or Fascist Mechanical.
Laughers
The question that I would like to put to Mr. Minister was the following: Your Excellency spoke about the Kindergartens that should extend across the country and in the reconversion of the mastership Schools of the Primary Teaching in Childhood Schools of Education. Very well then, there were 154 City Halls that as you like to know why these last ones answered negatively?
Answer of the minister:
In relation to the subject that was put to me by Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões, I have to inform that it is not to me that you should ask which the reason why 154 City Halls answered negatively, but to themselves. I can only suppose that they are not in conditions, at least for the moment, place at the disposal of the minister the facilities the installation at were requested at the minister's disposal.
THE OCCUPATIONS IN ALENTEJO
President: Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões can speak to formulate explanation requests too.
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - It is for a protest, Mr. President.
President: - Please.
The Speaker: - Since it is not my bench mate to whom Mr. Deputy Dias Ferreira referred, I profit to do what he cannot do:
To defend again the occupations in Alentejo (32) is a miserable act of despair. A factory of victims, a sacrifice that will costs the Country some million more some hunger more, some discredit more!
It is evident that we are willing to live democratically with all of the ideologies, even the communists, so much quick as heavy.
General laughers
The Speaker: what doesn’t give any possibility is o live in a country where the crime compensates and a Political Party is a gangster’s and attacker’s den. A lot of times I get to convince myself that between Mr. Cunhal’s Party and Al Capone the only difference is the prison.
President: Mr. Deputy you can’t, in any way, address to a Constitutional Party of the Republic acted in this Assembly and that it was chosen freely by the Portuguese people as you did. You cannot dub it den nor to use other expressions as such.
Laughers of PCP and of the PS.
President: - Of course the words are said and no longer have I had power for eliminating them from the Diary, as it would be my desire.
THE ADMINISTRATIVE COMMISSION OF RDP
President: Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões can speak to ask explanations.
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - Mr. Deputy Igrejas Caeiro, in truth, if I said that I liked to hear his peroration, I’d lie. I was fonder of hearing you when Mr. Deputy was funnier. To attack Mota Pinto’s Government, to attack the Minister of the Social Communication, it is fully inappropriate.
The Mota Pinto’s Government never moved a disciplinary proceeding against any journalist that, cheekily, attacked them.
President: - Excuse me, Mr. Deputy?
The Speaker: - Please, Mr. President.
President: - Mr. Deputy caught the speaker’s eye to ask explanations and you are doing an intervention.
Speaker: Indeed, I will ask for explanations, but I am just doing appreciation of what has been said for later to put my doubt.
As I was saying, the Government Mota Pinto didn't lift a single process, while all the other Governments moved processes to journalists, for mere nothings and even this Assembly itself, some days ago, here lifted a problem because of journalists, if I’m not mistaken, of the newspaper «O Dia» (The Day).
Then, after all, where is your exemption, Mr. Deputy? Mr. Deputy had the Broadcasting in your hand, and when the radio, from 1974 to 1978, was in the socialists' hands, a lot of people quit hearing the Portuguese Broadcasting.
Voices of PSD: - It is true, it is!
The Speaker: - Do you consider that, in that period, we had then a Broadcasting that was not propagandist? It was a radio that made propaganda of certain ideas.
Mr. Deputy Igrejas Caeiro, I think that the objectivity and the pluralism are attributes of our actual radio, although it doesn't consider it a marvel. However, it is much better than that we had when Mr. Deputy was in charge.
Voices of the PS and of PCP: - Not supported!
The speaker: I wanted to ask you the following: Do you think - and I do ask you to answer me quite frankly - what kind of Broadcasting, between 1974 and 1978, was objective and had the pluralism that Mr. Deputy here, in this moment claims? It is just this question I wanted to put you it would like your answer to be concise.
President: Mr. Deputy Igrejas Caeiro, there are more enrolled Messrs. Deputies. Do want to answer now or in the end?
Mr. Igrejas Caeiro (PS): - I prefer to answer just now.
President: Please.
Mr. Igrejas Caeiro (PS): I opted for a political declaration exactly to avoid that this Council wasted time and it is evident that the only thing that I want to answer to Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões is that he is right, I had lots of fun.
After all I preserved it but I should be ashamed of telling in this Assembly an anecdote called Cunha Simões.
Applauses of the PS.
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - Please tell it us, tell it! Or will you keep it for the second edition of the "Companheiros da Alegria (Happiness Mates)?"
SUBSIDIES TO THE SOCIAL COMMUNICATION
President: - To ask explanations Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões can speak.
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies, and Mr. Deputy Jorge Lemos: I heard with pleasure your intervention and I liked to ask you some explanations:
Does Mr. Deputy agree that the Government continues to subsidize the newspapers and the Social Communication organs that are giving incalculable damages to the Portuguese People?
Mr. Aboim Inglês (PCP): Will it be the New Newspaper?
The speaker: - Mr. Deputy, I don't have anything to see with the New Newspaper.
Laughers of PCP.
I never wrote for that newspaper...
Voices of PCP: - And for The Devil, not?
The Speaker: -... Nor for the Diary, nor for the other.
Mr. Aboim Inglês (PCP): - It is the Templário’s (40) voice.
The Speaker: - I have to tell you, Mr. Deputy, that a newspaper is a company and as such has to give income. If it doesn't give that profit, it must be closed.
As Messrs. Deputies know, I am from the interior of the Country and for that I know all its needs of all sorts; from the basic sanitation, to the schools, etc. While the newspapers and the Social Communication, in general, receive per year 40.000 contos (42), this country lives in the poverty and the people suffer everyday.
Voices of PCP: - We see; we see!
The Speaker: - When Mr. Deputy Jorge Lemos supports that Social Communication organs, he forgets that that money, given to some of those organs, that didn't know how to manage their newspapers - and who will want to have newspapers has to know to manage them, without diverting the public money - it is really necessary for the Portuguese People. Therefore, I think that to subsidize those newspapers is an authentic robbery to the Portuguese People.
I remind you yet that although in the other time there were newspapers that were subsidized by the Portuguese people...
Mrs. Ercília Talhadas (PCP): - That longings that Mr. Deputy feels!
The Speaker: - My lady, I am longing about it without a doubt, and also of hearing you.
Laughers
I am longing because before the April 25 I always said what pleased me and now I continue to say what pleases me. Before the April 25 I was never processed and today I have a process for what I wrote.
Inaudible protests of Mr. Deputy Victor Louro.
I have to warn you Mr. Deputy Victor Louro to be careful, as you’ll end in the Zoo. Look, I have to give a warning to you, Mr. Deputy, that you risk to get back for there!
Mr. Lino Lima (PCP): - Those who spoke in favour were not pursued.
The Speaker: - What is true is that there were newspapers that were subsidized in the other time, as it is the affair of the República newspaper, subsidized straight by the Portuguese people.
I remind Messrs. Deputies and the journalists themselves that that subsidy is the only honourable one that the journalist deserves. If the Portuguese People wants to have his newspapers he will buy them and read them. It was just what happened with the newspaper República and what should continue to happen, because we cannot continue to see in the parishes of the interior the lack of highways, of sewers, of water, of light, finally, it lacks of everything. If Mr. Deputy wants to live here in clover it is upon Messrs. Deputies. We cannot maintain a newspaper and to wait that the Government gives a subsidy for it to survive. Mr. Deputy Jorge Lemos, do I just want to know, besides the question that I already did you, which are the capitalist groups that are now privileged by the Government and which the private Press that is subsidized?
President: - Mr. Deputy Jorge de Lemos can answer if that's how he wants.
Mr. Jorge Lemos (PCP): - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies, Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões: Before answering to your demagogic set, and for better illustration on that which Mr. Deputy has just said, I liked to ask him if he spoke in personal name or on behalf of his Parliamentary Group...
Beginning for the end of his explanation requests, when saying that he was never pursued before the April 25, I should say that that is clear because the fascism never pursued fascists. I have, in fact, that it is clear for all to us.
Applauses of PCP, of some Deputies of the PS and of the independent Deputies Lopes Cardoso, Vital Rodrigues and Brás Pinto.
Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões worries a lot about the costs of the information, but perhaps he didn't hear my intervention. It shows that the Social Communication has a social cost and that same cost should be supported by the Government with what we don't agree is that, while one tights the purse strings to the public agencies that are pluralist, as it orders and guarantees the Constitution, are given subsidies to the private press. In fact, it is the newspaper «O Tempo (The Time)» that recognizes and that divulges in its pages that, for now, it will receive a subsidy of 12.000 euros. See, Mr. Deputy, are not we who claims that. But it would be also good that we knew how much your Party’s newspaper will receive. This will give you, maybe, a notion of our standpoint.
But Mr, Deputy, that it is so concerned with the lacks of the Portuguese people, you didn't worry when voted for on behalf of the Indemnities Law doing with that the great sharks, the great monopolists, receive million and million of euros in damage to the children and those that don't have work and nothing to receive!
Mr. Deputy didn't worry when voted in support of the Law of the Private Teaching that will bind the State to subsidize the schools for the children of the rich ones. Then he didn't fret!
Applauses of PCP
Mr. Pedro Loafs around (PSD): - That is false!
The Speaker: - He worries now because he thinks the Government should still close the siege to the press. That is your only goal, Mr. Deputy.
But as I have told you, the Fascism never pursued the fascists and of fascists we don't have lessons to profit nor we have, at least explanations to give them.
A voice of PSD: - They know everything!
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - Mr. President, I catch the speaker’s eye for a soft protest against this objection.
Laughers.
President: - Please, Mr. Deputy.
Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões (CDS): Mr. President, Mr. Deputy Jorge de Lemos: Actually, it didn't like to be very contusing with Mr. Deputy.
Mr. Deputy tried to offend me when calling me Fascist. I should tell you that I haven’t been offended quite anything. But it you must know that if you called me communist I should have been offended.
Mr. Lino Lima (PCP): Clear!
General laughers and applauses of PCP
The Speaker: Thank you very much, Messrs. Deputies. I wanted to tell Mister Deputy Jorge Lemos that I am sorry that, being an intelligent person be influenced by the Party that surrounds him, because, for me, the Portuguese Communist Party is the party of the laughing, of the foolishness... of the inferiority complex, of which Mr. Deputy will never be liberated. And I would have much more to tell him if, actually this didn't was paid by the Portuguese People and didn't have the time determined.
Actually the Press has, without any doubt, a social cost, but I should tell that I don’t support that there are subsidies for the nationalized press or for the private press. As it is said in my land “who wants acorn climbs." And for that, my friends, and if "who has nails is who plays guitar", who wants a newspaper or to do Social Communication will have to struggle because, as I said, it is the Portuguese People that suffers and that has the lacks. While Messrs. Deputies continue to defend to be paid this and that this and that, not remembering that is that people that pays them, in fact, princely.
Mr. António Pedrosa (PCP): You don’t deserve the salary that you are receiving!
The Speaker: - It is true. Each one should be paid for what he says and does in favour of the Portuguese People.
VOTE OF PROTEST AGAINST THE BRAZILIAN GOVERNMENT
DECLARATION OF VOTE
As a citizen, as free man, as spectator of the political panorama in Portugal in the last decades, I feel myself in the duty of avoiding that the bad financing of democracy and the repression lead the Portuguese to the dictatorship and the totalitarianism as it happens in the Soviet Union, in Chile, in Czechoslovakia, in Mozambique, in Angola or Polonius, etc. etc.
As elect Deputy by the Portuguese people I reaffirm my intention of only the Portuguese People here to defend in this Assembly.
Out of her, my support is total to all of the oppressed people.
Especially today, and especially in a moment in that the destinies of the Nation present quite strong uncertainty, it is tragic to divert the attentions of the Republic Assembly practicing one more ruffling to a foreign country, this time Brazil, in a platonic gesture of defence of rights that by itself doesn't have any effectiveness, and it can harm the international relations of Portugal.
ONE MORE USELESS VOTE, WASTE OF TIME, MONEY AND PATIENCE
Mr Cunha Simões (CDS): - What a miserably country! The Deputies spend their time discussing the subjects of the other countries and not ours. For instance, Mr. Deputy Acácio Barreiros is always discussing the subjects of the foreign countries, but... ours? Those of Portugal?
President: - Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões, if he wants to speak he will have to catch the speaker’s eye.
On the request formulated by Mr. Deputy Vilhena de Carvalho, if nobody opposes it, is granted.
Mr. Deputy Manuel Alegre can begin to speak.
Mr. Manuel Alegre (PS): - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: in spite of the postponement of the voting of this greeting vote, the Socialist Party’s Parliamentary Group wants to turn already known its position.
So, the Socialist Party is going to abstain, as it doesn't agree with the terms in that this vote is formulated. Independently of that, the Socialist Party is solidary with the fight of the people of the Iran to establish at his country a democratic system. And we formulate votes so that the Shah's fall creates genuinely a democratic process and so that, in peace and without external interventions, the Iranian people can choose freely his destiny.
That is our position.
Voices of the PS: Very well!
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - I catch the speaker’s eye, Mr. President.
President: - Please, Mr. Deputy.
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - Mr President, Messrs. Deputies: Actually, it is very sad to say this: this Country, that lives roughly and that suffers every day the largest privations sees that this Parliament continues to worry with the problems of the foreign countries and neglects the national ones. This cannot continue. I live inside the country. I know the pauperism that the person suffers.
Portugal is a disorganized country and I think that Mrs. Deputies are responsible for that that is occurring. I ask you, consequently to not continue to deviate of the pressing subjects of this Country camouflaging them with the problems of other countries.
For the time being, it was only this that I asked you, Messrs. Deputies.
Mr. Carlos Robalo (CDS). I catch the spear’s eye, Mr. President.
President: - Can you tell me which is the reason, Mr. Deputy? It is that already a Deputy of your Parliamentary Group has interfered.
Mr. Narana Coissaró (CDS): - It was to personal title, Mr. President!
Mr. Carlos Robalo (CDS): Mr. President, I caught the speakers’ eye to explain the sense of the vote of my Parliamentary Group, but, if, in regimental terms, I cannot intervene, I thank your Excellency for the information and I don't intervene.
President: Mr. Deputy is that according to the reglement cannot intervene more than one Deputy of each Party.
Mr. Carlos Robalo (CDS): - Mr. President, I thank your Excellency for the rigorous execution of the reglement, wanting albeit the same continues to be executed with the rigidity with that it is being at this moment.
President: - Mr. Deputy Carlos Robalo, the reglement will have to be executed with the rigidity that is possible and I think that this precept is very clear.
Mr. Nuno Abecasis (CDS): - I ask the speaker’s eye for an explanation.
President - Please Mr. Deputy.
Mr. Nuno Abecasis (CDS): - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies. I want to call the attention of Mr.President for the fact of not having interrogated Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões on the reason of his intervention.
Mr. President granted him the word in his legitimate right, but the whole Assembly had noticed that Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões wanted to express a personal opinion. As I think that the Party has the right, as has just made the PS, of expressing its position concerning this vote, I Ask Mr. President to reconsider your position.
President: - Mr. Deputy, your comrade deputy...
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - Comrade, no, Mr. President!
Laughers.
AN EXPLANATION
The opposition that I always manifested to the votes against or in favour of foreign countries, due to the inefficacy of the same ones, originated that the CDS, for the voice of Adelino Amaro da Costa refused to pronounce on this subject again.
Nuno Abecasis underlines it in the middle of this debate that was foreseen endless. CDS
To root out, once and for all, the evil, I had to be extremely hard to Deputy Aires Rodrigues and I also involved the Republic Assembly for connivance in the dilapidation of the public money.
It bursts the scandal.
Bigger was it not because the President of the Parliamentary Group, in that moment Deputy Rui Pena, after the Chairman of the board of the Republic, Deputy Teófilo Carvalho Pena, exemplary man and my nostalgic friend, to have closed the session, the CDS asked for its suspension.
Rui Pena and all my mates of CDS insisted for not returning on that day to the hemicycle, arguing that would make so the council to lose more time what I always intended to avoid.
Rui Pena, in the hemicycle, was unhappy when trying to pour oil on troubled waters. He offended me, maybe without intention. I can even understand the nervousness of the moment, but there says the dictation: who doesn't feel...
In January, of that same year, I already had requested to re-enter as teacher in the School of Santa Maria do Olival. The Party’s Direction didn't know about that intention and in the same way they haven’t even conjectured, I had become independent as soon as I had knowledge of the unhappy terms that Rui Pena used to reproach my behaviour and to ask excuses.
To the Deputies of other Parties I would admit these and other words even more violent, as I had provoked the situation and the language transcend a lot of times the edge of the reasonable. To a Deputy of my Party I would never authorise it.
The friendship, the union and the confidentiality of whatever was going by in the bosom of CDS was very big. If among us, the words didn't have substance or they were minimized, in the hemicycle they took the form of insult.
Let’s go then to what happened. I do transcribe the final part of the debate, already without my presence in the hemicycle.
THE SCANDAL
A LAST VOTE WAS THE FULL EXPLOSION. SINCE THIS MOMENT MY POLITICAL CAREER TURNED STRONG - MINDED
Mr. Nuno Abecasis (CDS): - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: In first place, we abstained from voting because already we previously announced in this Assembly, we understood that it is not this the fitting place, for systematically we vote on problems of international politics.
But even if it wasn’t so, we would be disabled of giving our adhesion to the vote presented by Deputy Mrs. Carmelinda Pereira just as it comes expressed. Indeed, this Mrs. Deputy reveals a great sensibility in relation to the problems of the Human Rights that we, here, have been defending uncompromisingly, but it seems consolidate them just only in the Iran 15 militants of the Trotskyist Party, arrested, forgetting the thousands of people that were shot down without have at least been judged and forgetting that, in terms of Human Rights, to all men assists the defence of those rights, even if the person in cause is the Shah from Persia.
Mr. Rui Pena (CDS): Very well!
The speaker: - Besides, we cannot understand that in this Assembly, invoking the Human Rights, come a vote of these ignoring that the same "committees Khomeini" declared the universal persecution to a man that is the Shah of Persia in the present case, declaring that whatever the place where he takes refuge must be liquidated by those same committees and for that ideology that shapes them.
Therefore, that must be clear that the CDS, just as already previously did the European Union of the Christian Democracies, condemns everything, by all that happens in the present in Iran and not only the arrest of the 15 members of the Trotskyist party. Those, we also lamented them, but our condemnation is much larger than what here runs expressed.
Sr.Rui Pena (CDS): Very well!
President: - Mr. Deputy Aires Rodrigues can speak.
Mr. Aires Rodrigues (Indep.) Mr. President, I catch the speaker’s eye to protest in relation to the declaration of vote of Mr. Deputy of CDS.
In first place, I will say that it is evident that in the vote are clearly expressed...
President: - If Mr. Deputy gives permission to remind you that Mr. Deputy Nuno Abecasis made a vote declaration, and in relation to the vote declarations if they cannot make protests.
Speaker: Mr. President, you are following a too rigid formalism.
Laughers
... as former declarations, have they form it of vote declarations or of interventions, protests have always been made.
President: - Once Mr. Deputy has not been offended personally, he cannot speak to protest against a vote declaration.
Speaker: - Mr. President, I has been offended insofar I voted in support of this vote, having, wrongfully, Mr. Deputy of CDS brought on that those that voted for this vote favourably.
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): Why don’t we close this Assembly?! It is the Portuguese People that is paying! We only continue to worry with the foreigner!
President: Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões, I ask you the favour of only speaking when you are granted to.
On Mr. Deputy Aires Rodrigues, I have to say that cannot let continue talking about this subject.
Why Mr. Deputy doesn't propose the amendment of the Regulations relatively to this point...
The discussion dragged on endless. I didn't tolerate any more. I felt failed, frustrated and accomplice for squandering the money, the time and the trust that the People had deposited over me. When hearing, again, the tolerant President to authorize, once again, the Deputy Aires Rodrigues to speak, I screamed with all my forces:
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - This is not the Assembly of the Republic, thiss the Assembly of the Shame!
Mr. Aires Rodrigues (Indep): - Mr. President, in fact we are accustomed to Mr. Deputy's behavior...
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - You are not a Deputy, you are the tick of the Portuguese People!
Mr. Aires Rodrigues (Indep): - President, I consider that I was insulted, as well as all the Deputies of this Assembly, as Mr. Deputy, that seeks to trample down the popular will and seeks, at the same time, to corrupt this Assembly.
Mrs. Maria Emília (PS): Very well!
The Speaker: - The mockery I was victim doesn't attains only me, Mr. President. And for that I ask your Excellency to intervene in that sense.
Voices of the PS: - Very well!
President: - Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões, do you want to remove what you have just said?
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - Mr. President, before what the Portuguese People is suffering, I cannot remove what I have said. This Assembly is taking care of the subject...
President: - The meeting is interrupted.
The Speaker: -... of foreign countries and not of dealing with the matters of Portugal...
President: - Mr. Deputy, the meeting is interrupted.
The Speaker: -... it is actually the Assembly of the Shame!
Protests of the PS and of PCP.
Mr. Vital Moreira (PCP): - This cannot continue, Mr. President, it is intolerable!
Pause.
President: - It is reopened the meeting. Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões, do you want or not to give explanations to Mr. Deputy that you offended?
Mr. Cunha Simões (CDS): - Mr. President, what I have to tell Mr. Deputy Aires Rodrigues is that the time he here loses to dealing with foreign subjects, if he dealt with the Portuguese ones, in behalf on the well - being of the Portuguese People, I would be even in his support, but so I’ll have to be always against.
President: - Oh, Mr. Deputy...
Speaker: - I quite apologize to V. your Excellency for whom I have the utmost respect.
President: - It doesn't seem.
Mrs. Maria Emília (PS): Very well!
The Speaker: - Yes, I do Mr. President. Simply, to Mr. Deputy Aires Rodrigues I cannot apologize, nor I can remove what I have said.
Mr. Rui Pena (CDS): - I ask the speaker’s eye, Mr. President.
President: - Please.
Mr Rui Pena (CDS): - Mr. President, in the lawful terms I request the interruption of the works for ten minutes.
President: - The application is granted. The meeting is interrupted for ten minutes.
It was 5 p.m.
President: Messrs. Deputies ,it is reopen the meeting.
It was 20 past 5 p.m.
President: - I communicate to this Council that Mr. Deputy that some minutes before disturbed the works is not present.
Mr. Deputy Rui Pena can speak.
Mr.Rui Pena (CDS): - Mr. President, it is to your Excellency that, in first place, I would like to speak and, very simply, for, on behalf of the Parliamentary Group of CDS, to say that I am sorry for the language in that it elapsed the last part of the debate and that it deserved the interruption on the part of your Excellency.
On behalf of the Parliamentary Group of CDS I want to present to the Assembly of the Republic the excuses of this group for the abject expressions with that, as we realize, the Assembly of the Republic - the Institution par excellence, flag of our democracy - was insulted by a Deputy of my group. Furthermore I wanted to say that we, centrists, always defended and presented ourselves in this Parliament, with a special way of being, tolerating, without never to decrease, even one moment, our determination in that ideals the other Parties, for the other Deputies, for the several point of view that here are expressed in this Assembly...
Mr. Carlos Lage (PS): - Very well!
The speaker: - And that all understand are expressed in the sense of the dignity of this house and in the sense of improvement of our country.
Mr. Salgado Zenha (PS) - Very well!
The speaker: - For all this, Mr. President and Messrs. Deputies I wanted to request, on behalf of my Parliamentary Group, that your Excellency determined on the last part of the debate and on aggressions, to the best of our knowledge and belief, improper to a Deputy of this House, they were simply deleted in the memorandum of this session.
Applauses of CDS, of the PS, of PSD and of the social-democratic independent Deputies.
Mr. José Luís Nunes (PS): - I ask the speaker’s eye.
President: - Please, Mr. Deputy.
Mr. José Luís Nunes (PS): - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: My words are very brief to justify our vote in favour, in relation to the vote presented by Mrs. Deputy Carmelinda Pereira.
In first place, I should say, as it is usual in this House or in any Assembly - and it would not be necessary to repeat it – we voted the conclusions of the vote and not the reasons.
In second place, the Assembly acquired another responsibility in this matter when if voted for some time ago, congratulation’s vote for events that had passed in Iran, country to which refers the vote in cause.
In third place, I think that always continuing protesting against offences that they aren’t done in any part of the world to the Man's Rights, in a future regulation Reform this problem of the votes, in all its width, should be tackled face to face so as to enhance and to give force to the positions that the Assembly should take in this matter and to avoid a constant trivialization that doesn’t interests anybody.
Applauses of the PS.
Mr. Vital Moreira (PCP) I ask the speaker’s eye.
President: - Please, Mr. Deputy.
Mr. Vital Moreira (PCP): - Mr. President, Messrs. When I asked the speaker’s eye next to the unqualifiedly expression uttered by Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões, I intended to ask him to register, on behalf of the Parliamentary Group of PCP, a protest for that sentence that, obviously, doesn't just reach only the Deputy concerning which was uttered, but naturally the Assembly of the Republic, as Institution, and all the Deputies that are part of her.
To assert, in the way as it was done, exactly, that the Assembly of the Republic is a shame" - this said by a Deputy - it is something that cannot be heard without the most lively and vehement protest.
However, there is a thing that figures us. It is that Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões came to point out the following: it is not blunder of the Assembly of the Republic that he here is and, in fact, for shame of the Assembly.
Voices of PCP: - Very well!
Mr. Amândio of Azevedo (PSD): - Not supported!
The speaker: Those responsibilities go into somebody else, not to the Assembly in herself, that it is composed for who here is. In any case, we believe that Mr. Deputy Rui Pena’s words, pertinent, opportune and justified - come to give reason to the voices that immediately got up, protesting against Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões' intervention.
It remains for us to wait that the next intercalary elections allow Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões doesn't embarrass the Assembly of the Republic again.
Voices of PCP - Very well!
Mr. Rui Pena (CDS): - I ask the speaker’s eye, Mr. President.
President: Please, Mr. Deputy.
Mr. Rui Pena (CDS): - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: It is just only to declare that, just as my Parliamentary Group has revolted there are a little while ago with the offences that a member of this Group addressed to a Deputy of this body, now, on behalf of the same Parliamentary Group and as Deputy, abrogate the violent words that were uttered against my group mate Cunha Simões.
Applauses of CDS and of Mr. Deputy Amândio Azevedo (PSD).
Mr. Aires Rodrigues (Indep): - Mr. President, I ask the speaker’s eye in order to read, if you allow me, an application that will put later to the table.
President. - Please, Mr. Deputy.
Mr. Aires Rodrigues (Indep): - The application is of the following tenor:
On account of the outrageous content of the statements uttered by Mr.
Cunha Simões, that reached my quality of Deputy and of the whole Assembly, nicknaming her of Assembly of the Shame, I request that the Assembly condemns this act and demands to recall the insults.
I believe that this Assembly could verify, at once, in the name of Mr. Deputy Rui Pena, the condemnation of the uttered statements, but I understand that the insult doesn't have a personal character, it is a political insult, and, as such, Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões' presence, in this Assembly, must be dependent of the recall of the uttered insults, that reach the Assembly and the Deputies in their whole.
I go, therefore, to lead to the Table this application.
President: - Meanwhile I communicate to the Assembly that is already finished, for a while, the period of before the order of the day and that there is in the table an application of the PS asking for the prolongation of it, what in fact is regulation, and therefore the extension is granted.
Mr. Rui Pena (CDS): - I ask the speaker’s eye.
President: - Please, Mr. Deputy.
Mr. Rui Pena (CDS): - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: It was just to refer that, previously to that application, I formulated another request for the purpose of that the dialogue where were made the mentioned offences to the Assembly and Mr. Deputy Mr. Deputy Aires Rodrigues, they were really called from the memorandum of this Assembly.
Mr. Veiga of Oliveira (PCP): - It cannot leave.
Mr. Vital Moreira (PCP): - Mr. President, I ask the speaker’s eye.
President: - Please.
Vital Sr Moreira (PCP): - Mr. Deputy. Deputy Rui Pena understood ought protest against the form, for itself qualified of violent, as I referred to Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões.
Mr. Cunha Simões: I should tell you that the form that I used was the softest I could have used in the circumstance.
Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões is to be given in such exhibitions. In these circumstances he crossed himself, and if I’m allowed a personal bewail, is that a Deputy that is permitted attitudes of this kind continues to represent in a Parliamentary Group of this Assembly.
Voices of PCP: Very well!
President: - Messrs. Deputies, so there are two applications: one of Mr. Deputy Rui Pena so that are deleted from the act of today the words uttered by Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões and another presented by Mr. Deputy Rui Pena already read by himself.
But to decide on these two applications I think that I will have to hear this Assembley, in order to avoid any decision of mine and supported for some groups and not for others. Therefore, maybe being the Assembly to take an arrangement was the more practical solution. Let's hope he is right.
Sr Magalhães Mota (indep.): I ask the speaker’s eye.
President: - Please.
Mr. Magalhães Mota (Indep): - Without intending to discuss the presented applications, because that is not possible, we would like, however, of also doing some considerations under the incident that to gave origin to them.
We believe for us that the reglement is clear as for what constitute duties of the Deputies, in the terms of subheading and d) of the number 1 of art. 15th, to respect the dignity of the Assembly and his Deputies. To observe the order and the discipline fastened in the reglement and to accept the President's authority. They are clear dispositions of our reglement; they are duties of the Deputies that, for us it is also clear, were infringed in this session.
But, Mr. President and Messrs. Deputies, as far as I can see it deals with duties to which our reglement doesn’t match any sanction.
We can at this time and in this place to mourn for the fact, but we believe that the reglement is clear. And so what we suggest is that once heard the reglement and Mandates Commission, that gap, because a gap is at stake, can be integrated.
It doesn't seem us that any of the proposed solutions is viable. In first place, because the Diary should tell what happens in the Assembly; it cannot be amended as we want; it can not, unhappily, be modified. The facts are what they are, the produced declarations as they has been, we all regret, but the truth is that are fact and the diary must be the faithful memorandum of that that cropped up during the session.
In second place, it doesn't also seem us that it is possible this Assembly to impose somehow to the will of the same electorate. Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões was chosen as any of us and this Assembly doesn't have, naturally, competence to pronounce on his mandate, so far it could interrogate on the coherence of whom, understanding that the Assembly is a shame, in her stays.
Mr. Vital Moreira (PCP) - Very well!
The speaker: - That is sure that it is lawful and that interrogation we will make her, but we cannot overlap ourselves nor we should have the claim of dealing ourselves with it, for our hands, to amend the vote of who also chose us too.
Mr. Vital Moreira (PCP): - I ask the speaker’s eye, Mr. President.
President: Please.
Mr. Vital Moreira (PCP): - Mr. President, I will be brief.
I have asked the speaker’s eye to support the theories set by Mr. Mr. Deputy Magalhães Mota.
As to the first application, it seems us that he doesn't have object and it contradicts fundamentally other regulation norms, according to the ones particularly the diary must reproduce all that happens in the Assembly. On the second application, as it seems us that, although the attitudes worthy of censorship of a Deputy should be censorship object by the Parliamentary Group where he is integrated and of censorship for each one of the political forces here represented, does not exists, however institutional censure, as they are not foreseen in the reglement of this Assembly.
However we believe, that the President of the Republic Assembly was clear, when ordering to suspend the session, in what it deserved of censorship the attitude taken by Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões. As far as we are concerned we have already expended it and I believe that the Parliamentary Groups that are of that opinion should also express.
However, we understand there are not place for institutional censorship of the Assembly of the Republic as such.
Mr. Veiga of Oliveira (PCP): - Very well!
President: - Messrs. Deputies, we are, as it has just been said, before a problem that doesn't have established sanction nor where to find similar case.
Besides the dispositions that were mentioned by Mr. Deputy Magalhães Mota, - the paragraphs d) and e) of the no. 1 of art. º 15 of the reglement - there is still the paragraph i) of art.º 26 of the reglement, that says that it competes to the Chairman of the Assembly of the Republic, as for the works of the Assembly, to maintain the discipline and the order.
As it has been seen hear several Deputies of several Parties have been suggesting several solutions. That is, there is not, in fact, an objective that has been attracted by all Parties. This way, and after giving the speaker’s eye to the Deputies that have already asked for it, I would propose - if the Assembly so understood, as I doesn’t want to propose it only for me - a Parliamentary Groups assembly in my Cabinet.
Mr. Rui Pena (CDS): - Mr. President, I ask the speaker’s eye.
Mr. President: - Please, Mr. Deputy.
Mr. Rui Pena (CDS): - Mr. President, it was to remove the application that there is little time ago I formulated.
President: As nobody opposes I consider it retired.
Mr. Aires Rodrigues (Indep): - Mr. President, in function of the subjects that now were lifted up of the point of view of the reglement, he puts the problem if, in fact, it can have an institutional sanction of the Assembly of the Republic before the uttered insults. The application that I presented was in the sense that there was a condemnation, through a voting done by this Assembly, on the offensive character of the uttered statements, condemning those uttered statements politically, condemning those statements politically and demanding the retreat of the insults on the part of the Deputy that uttered them.
It appears me that is not banned by the reglement – even that is not an expressed declaration in the sense of a condemnation – and I hold that face to the clearly insulting purport of the statements, that condemnation in the name of the Assembly would have definitely a larger force than the simple socket of word of each one of the Parliamentary Groups or of the Deputies of this Assembly. It is in that sense that I think that she should exist. Anyway, I propose a reflection of the Council in this sense, before the application to be voted, so that the other Parliamentary Groups can pronounce on her the application that I presented and the content of it.
Mr. Amândio de Azevedo (PSD): - I ask the speaker’s eye.
President: - Please, Mr. Deputy.
Mr. Amândio of Azevedo (PSD): Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies, I am sorry that this incident had not considered closed next to the CDS’s President of the Parliamentary Group , Mr. Deputy Rui Pena words.
Everything that was said next contributed much more to complicate the subjects and to the lost of time to the Assembly than to explain this subject.
Voices of CDS: - Very well.
The Speaker: Fortunately the application presented by Mr. Deputy Rui Pena was removed, because it shocks visibly with dispositions of the reglement.
As for the application of Mr Deputy Aires Rodrigues, Mr.President already invited the Deputy in focus to remove the words formulated.
Mr. Aires Rodrigues (Indep): - Mr President, I maintain the application in what refers to the condemnation of the Assembly in relation to the offensive statements against it uttered, that is, the first part of the application that says, if I'm not mistaken, because I don't have it now here, that the Assembly condemns the offensive character of the uttered statements. As I said, I don't have the application here, but I think that the Table can read it.
President: - Then Mr. Secretary you will read the application, so that Mr. Deputy Aires Rodrigues can say what must be retired.
Secretary (Pinto of Silva): - The application of Mr. Deputy Aires Rodrigues is of the following tenor:
In account of the offensive statements pronounced by Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões, that reached my quality of Deputy and of the Assembly of the Republic, nicknaming it of Assembly of the Shame, I request that the Assembly condemns this act and demand the retreat of the insults.
The speaker: - So, I maintain the text of the application to "that the Assembly condemns this act", removing the remaining.
To draw to a close, Mr President, Messrs. Deputies, I consider that is serious what happened in this House. I deem that the question was an excuse that was used, in a certain political moment, for Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões...
President: - Mr. Deputy cannot base the application.
The Speaker: - In that case I finish, not accepting the resource interposed by Mr. Deputy José Luís Nunes.
President: - Messrs. Deputies, I insist on my suggestion that maybe an easier solution for the problem, since, that the reglement dispositions don't contemplate it, asking that it is made a meeting immediately in my Cabinet with the representatives of each party.
Mr. Salgado Zenha (PS): - I ask the speaker’s eye, Mr. President.
President: - Please.
Mr. Salgado Zenha (PS): - Mr. president, we will accept your Excellency’s decision of going to a Parliamentary Group’s conference, once that the problem already hit the point we get to, for the Socialist Parliamentary Group’s Party the solution is extremely simple. For us, the Table has powers of maintenance of the discipline of this meeting and therefore it will be able to, in the course of the parliamentary works, to exercise those powers or removing the word, etc.. Therefore, ought, and that for me is patent, the Assembly will never be able to condemn the performance of a Deputy through a vote. That would be, obviously, contrary to the general principles of the Right consigned in our Constitution, that says that nobody can be condemned without exercising his defence right, and even the European Convention of the Man's Rights, that stipulates a command of the same nature.
It would be extremely inopportune and absurd that due to a motion presented by Mrs. Deputy Carmelinda Pereira, in which is condemned the violation of the Man's Rights, a group mate of that same Deputy is condemned propose to this Assembly that violates those some Rights of the Man that she intends to defend.
Therefore, this Assembly can never pronounce a condemnation vote against a Deputy that, in fact, it is not here present and therefore cannot defend himself. Mr. President will be able to, yes, in the opportune moment or when he understands, to maintain the order. It can be thought about the alteration of our reglement. Now that expeditors and summary process, proposed by Mr. Deputy Aires Rodrigues, it is contrary the Man's Rights, it is contrary our Constitutional Order, it is contrary the European Convention of the Man's Rights, and doesn't have pertinence nor has object. Whether it be put to voting, we will vote against; if it will be not admitted, we will support the Table.
Mr. Aires Rodrigues (Indep): - I ask the speaker’s eye, Mr. President.
President: - For what, Mr. Deputy?
Mr. Aires Rodrigues (Indep.): - Mr. President, it is to announce that I remove the application.
President: - Please.
Sr Aires Rodrigues (Indep): - Mr. President, Messrs. Deputies: I consider that the statements produced by Mr. Deputy Salgado Zenha that Mr. Deputy Cunha Simões's condemnation, not being him present, have some foundation, as it would be a summary proceeding, contrary to the principles of the freedom and of the justice. In that sense, and because we are contrary to summary proceedings, because we are contrary, and I believe that we already have demonstrated it, to the hindrance and the free exercise of the democracy, we remove the presented application. Therefore we deem that this Assembly, through the proposal that Mr. president has just done to the Parliamentary Groups, he should take into account the political content of the uttered statements and it should discuss the way as the subject should have a solution.
We remove the application, but we feel that the Assembly, through the proposal done by Mr. President or others, should mull over insulting character of the uttered statements.
Mr. Olívio França (indep): - I ask the speaker’s eye, Mr. President.
President: - I had already close up the incident. But whether Mr. Deputy realize that has some declaration to carry through, please.
Mr. Olívio França (indep): - Mr. President I was going to say that it was not necessary the meeting of the representatives of the Parties of this Assembly. And due to the circumstance, in fact, already demonstrated, that there isn’t any sanction against the words uttered by the Deputies in this hemicycle, I accept that the problem belongs to ethics and of morals and therefore the own movement of all this incident in the Assembly already did, without no doubt about it, the judgement of the Deputy's words in cause. I deem that after this the incident should be bungled and it is not necessary to say anything else.
President: - Mr. Deputy, the problem must be put this way: The President ought maintaining the discipline, but ahead of the Deputy's reaction and due to his approach, that has not been doable.
I regard the incident as bunged up but I think, in fact, that a meeting of the representative Parties, about the problem, should be set, even to define the future performance in order to avoid further state of affairs alike.
As tomorrow we have the customary Parliamentary Groups conference we’ll put there the problem seeing that today the works are already far beyond the standard and maybe we’ll get better to the bottom of the problem.
EXIT OF CDS
Mr. President of the Republic Assembly:
I thank Your Excellency that, under the legal dispositions, from this moment (August 13, 1979) on, to give knowledge to the Assembly that I’ll turn into Independent Deputy, releasing, this way, all the vinculums that link me to the Social Democratic Centre.
Yours truly,
Cunha Simões
SOME APPLICATIONS SENT TO DIFFERENT MINISTRIES
APPLICATION
Mr. President of the Republic Assembly:
I thank Your Excellency that, under the legal dispositions, from this moment (August 13, 1979) on, to give knowledge to the Assembly that I’ll turn into Deputy, releasing, this way, all the vinculums that link me to the Social Democratic Centre (SDC).
Yours truly,
I apply to Your Excellency for, under the legal dispositions, elementary and constitutional, to the shelter of the legal reglement dispositions, and constitutional applicable, that, through the National Service of Employment and of the General Office of State of the Employment, to be supplied with the following data:
National Service of Employment:
a) Unemployed Level at this time in Portugal;
b) Work posts Existence before April 25;
c) Workstations existence after the April 25;
d) Foresight of new work posts in the
Employment General State Office:
1) Budget spent in 1976 to subsidize deficient companies;
2) Foreseen budget in 1977 for the same purpose.
Lisbon, February 3, 1977, - Deputy Cunha Simões (SDC).
APPLICATION
Mr. President of the Republic Assembly:
Under the paragraph c) of art.º 159 of the Constitution and of the correspondents reglamentary dispositions, I apply for to the Ministry of the Intern Administration to inform me about the destiny of the Groundwork of Restructuring, elaborated by the National Commission of the Restructuring of the Service of Fires there is a lot of time delivered.
São Bento Palace, February 22, 1978 - the Deputy of the DSC Cunha Simões.
APPLICATION
Mr. President of the Republic Assembly:
Under the paragraph c) of art.º 159 of the Constitution and of the correspondents reglamentary dispositions, I apply for to the Ministry of
the Foreign Businesses that, through the competent services, know what ensue with the citizen Fernando Nunes Maria, prisoner 20 months ago in the Republic of Angola.
Fernando Nunes Maria is natural of the place of Barbados, parish of
Areias, Council of Ferreira do Zêzere, and he rendered service in Diamang as mechanic.
This Portuguese citizen was arrested without formed fault, although, as it is known, for arrived people of that territory, the citizen Fernandes Nunes Maria serves as electrician coercively to Cuban people.
Palace of S. Bento, November 9, 1978 - the Deputy of CDS,
Cunha Simões
LEGEND
(1).Camões: Luís Vaz De Camoëns, or Camoens Portugal's great national poet, author of the epic poem Os Lusíadas (1572; The Lusiads), which describes Vasco da Gama's discovery of the sea route to India, alleged reason to tell Portugal’s history (born c. 1524/25, Lisbon
died June 10, 1580, Lisbon).
(2).Camilo: Camilo Castelo Branco, Portuguese novelist whose 58 novels range from Romantic melodramas to works of realism. He is sometimes known as the Portuguese Balzac (born March 16, 1825, Lisbon, Port.
died June 1, 1890, Seide).
(3).Fernando Pessoa: Poet whose part in Modernism gave Portuguese literature European significance (born June 13, 1888, Lisbon, Port.
died Nov. 30, 1935, Lisbon).
Marcelo Caetano: Portugal´s Prime Minister from September 1968, when he succeeded António de Oliveira Salazar, until the revolution of April 1974.
(5).Miranda's Pauliteiros - Group of folk music.
(6).Alheira: kind of garlic sausage: it is made in Trás-os-Montes (11) and in a general way in the north of the country with bread and several meats, and everything temperate with garlic.
(7).Minho: Portugal is divided in provinces, 11 in all, to facilitate the country’s administration. Minho is the more north-eastern province of Portugal, close to Spanien.
(8).Ribatejo is a Portuguese province that begins close to the left bank of river Tagus and extends to the east and inland from Estremadura province covering to the north of the municipality of Tomar and then down to the province of Alentejo that has, now, about 500 thousand inhabitants and 6689 km2 of surface. It is renowned for the creation of the bulls for the bulls’ (toiros) fights (touradas) as, for example, in Campo Pequeno, Lisbon.
(9).Beira Alta: Province in the centre of Portugal, close to mountain Estrela (star)
(10).Gil Vicente: 16th century Portuguese Poet.
(11).Trás-os-Montes (before the mounts): Province close on eastward side to Minho (7)
(12).Old of Restelo – the expression “offends the old of Restelo” means “offends the people holding to ancient ideas”.
The VELHO DO RESTELO” (Old of Restelo) is a mythic figure of Camões’ epic poem that, when the Portuguese Caravels departed from Restelo (a shore close to Lisbon) reprimanded bitterly those who were going to sail: He represents the old ideas and the sailors who were going to seek for new horizons the new ideas.
(13).S. Bento – onomastic - Headquarters of the National Assembly in Portugal.
(14).Lisnave and Setnave - Naval construction Works, the former in Lisbon, the latter in Setúbal
(15).Lisbonian Casino
(16).Antero e Eça de Queirós – Portuguese 19th century writers and politician.
(17).Maria Matos – 2nd middle 20th century Portuguese actress whose name was given to a Lisbonian theatre.
(18).19th century writers.
(19).19th century politicians.
(20).20th century politicians.
(21).Name of a Newspaper.
(22).Chiado - Commercial centre next to Rossio and renowned for the writers’ tertúlias (23).in its belt cafés.
(23).Tertúlia - literary assembly.
(24).”Andor” - a wooden framework for carrying statues of saints in procession.
(25).The inhabitants of the region called Beira Interior (Inner Edge).
(26).The Beira Interior (Inner Edge) is composed by two parts: The northern one – Beira Alta and the southern one, close to the former – Beira Baixa.
(27).Estrela (star) - The highest mountain in Portugal - 2000 m.
(28).Costa do Sol (Coast of the Sun) - Bathing area on the edge of the region between Lisbon and Cascais.
(29).ESCUDO – Portuguese currency when the book was written.€ 1 = 200 escudos (200$00).
(30).In the voices of people thinking alike the leftist deputy Acácio.
(31).Mondego – a Portuguese river which begins in the Estrela Mountain and flows by Penacova and across Coimbra to the Atlantic in Figueira da Foz.
(32).Alentejo, comprises the two provinces, Alto and Baixo Alentejo that extend from Ribatejo (8) to Algarve, in the South.
(33).D. Miguel – Second son of Afonso VI that disputed the throne to his nephew and future wife D. Maria II and as he has been defeated he must walk to the exile in Vienna of Austria.
(34).Afonso Costa – A strong man of the regime featured by the revolution of Otober 5 that draw the Portuguese monarchy to a close. One of his measures has been to decree the Portuguese army’s presence in World War I.
(35).Henrique Galvão – An officer of Salazar’s regime that dissatisfied at the position of this one toward the Portuguese colonies captures the ship Santa Maria no more than to draw the world’s attention for the Portuguese people disabled of defying the tyrant. And that was the very reason why he travels, in turn, to the exile.
(35).Jorge de Sena - Portuguese Professor and renowned author obliged to teach in the United States in account of his political ideas.
(36).Fado – Typical popular Portuguese song that can be sorrowful or cheerful, ironic or satirical, accompanied to guitar and viola (Spanish guitar).
(37).Totoloto – Sporting lot.
(38).Totobola – A modality similar to the totoloto
(39).€ 2,50 - 500 paus a month – Paus means ESCUDOS in jargon; ESCUDO – Portuguese currency when the book was written€ 1 = 200 escudos (200$00).
(40).Templário (Templar) – A weekly paper of the city of Tomar.
(41).Nabão – The river that crosses Tomar.
(42).40.000 contos = € 2000.000 – 1 conto = 1.000 escudos (currency of the time) = € 5.
(43).41 Milhões de contos (41 million contos) = 205 million euros. See (42) too.
●●●
DO YOU WANT TO BE OFFERED A BOOK?
Telefone: 249 881 397
Fax: 249 891 128
Letter:
Cunha Simões
Apartado 128
2384-909 Alcanena
●●●
●●
●
Whenever you’ll intend
to contact the author, do
it by e-mail, fax, or telephone.
●●● ●●● ●●●
●●● ●●●
●●●
●●
●
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário