A general strike in fascist Portugal 1944: how can it succeed?

Review: “Until Tomorrow Comrades,” by Manuel Tiago (Álvaro Cunhal), translated by Eric A. Gordon and published April 7, 2023, by International Publishers, Co., Inc.

I remember June 13, 2005. On that day I heard the news on the radio after returning from the park: Álvaro Cunhal, secretary general of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) for more than 30 years, had just died at the age of 91.

Cunhal had spent some 15 years in the fascist prisons of Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar’s Portugal. He devoted his entire life to building workers’ struggles and the PCP.

In January 1960, Cunhal and ten of his comrades made a dramatic escape from the maximum-security prison in Peniche on the Atlantic coast. He had been inside for 11 years and used some of that time to draft works of fiction, smuggled out and later published under the pseudonym Manuel Tiago. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that Cunhal announced that he was indeed the author of these novels.

What made that June day unforgettable for me is that I had just finished reading the original Portuguese version of the novel, “Até amanhã camaradas” (“Until Tomorrow Comrades”), which some of Cunhal’s long-time comrades had sent me earlier in 2005. With my rudimentary Portuguese I could follow the plot — but I also missed a lot. Later I watched a miniseries based on the novel made for Portuguese television.

“Until Tomorrow Comrades” describes how a general strike develops. Its protagonists are mostly agricultural workers in a farming region east of Lisbon in 1944 and the communists working clandestinely with them. Cunhal brought to his writing craft what few authors can: an enormous experience in how to build a fighting, working-class organization under all sorts of different conditions.

What a sublime task those who build a fighting, working-class party must perform: Start out with human beings with all their strengths and weaknesses, fears and courage, foibles and talents, and wind up with an effective implement to struggle against an oppressive ruling class with centuries of domination behind them. The challenge for any party organizer is to mesh these individuals so that their collective whole turns out to be much greater than the mere sum of their parts.

But this novel is no pamphlet on party organizing, which Cunhal has also written. It is a story of human beings, a story that Tiago/Cunhal has told skillfully.

How comrades work together

As we read of the planning of a general strike in the region, we see how the individuals involved work together, where they mesh, where they clash and how the Communist Party becomes implanted in that agricultural region of Portugal.

The strike succeeds in mobilizing the great majority of the workers in the region.

Nevertheless, the fascist police crush it by force. Many of its leaders are captured, jailed and tortured. Some are killed; others must flee or hide. The regional organization seems broken.

But no. That’s the surprise, to the reader and to the party organizers in Lisbon. It’s an important lesson that all people who dream of revolution must keep in mind.

Despite the police terror, despite the casualties, the masses of workers have more confidence in their own strength. They also have gained even more confidence in the dedication and seriousness of the PCP. Before the national PCP organization from Lisbon can reach the strike region with help some months later, the remaining local party organizers have pulled themselves together and re-established the regional organization.

Some of the women — including a woman comrade who had been frustrated by her role as helper and housekeeper of the clandestine household and who suffers a personal tragedy worthy of any story of unrequited or impossible love — become leaders and are recognized as such by the party.

The translator’s role

We should thank Eric Gordon, who is the cultural editor at People’s World, and everyone who helped make this extraordinary novel available in English, extraordinary at least in the United States, where it is rare to find popular novels where all the major characters are communists, nearly all factory or farm workers, and all are as heroic as they are human. Gordon’s work allowed me to deepen my understanding of what were some of my favorite fictional characters and better grasp the events of that dramatic strike.

Gordon has translated all Tiago/Cunhal’s fictional work to English. His efforts and those of his collaborators will allow others whose main language is English to share in appreciating and enjoying these works.

The English versions of Cunhal’s fiction are available at International Publishers Co. Inc., ⁦intpubnyc.com/browse/until-tomorrow-comrades and from online booksellers.

Catalinotto, a Workers World managing editor, is the author of “Turn the Guns Around: Mutinies, Soldiers’ Revolts and Revolutions” (2017) and a novel, “Cold War: A Love Story” (2022). A version of this review was first published by the Dorothy Day Labor Forum, Spokane, Washington, earlier this year.