THE DAWN OF FREEDOM BY ANTÓNIO SAMPAIO DA NÓVOA

THAT DAY, the dawn broke. In a few minutes, I arrived at Cais de Sodré. I stayed there, on the streets of Lisbon, for three or four days. I don’t remember where I slept or even if I slept. The time had come. Anything was possible. It had to be now. Immediately. In Rua António Maria Cardoso, shots were fired in our direction. Next to me, a friend is shot. Everything seemed unreal. In Largo da Misericórdia, a few hours later, I understood April. In the middle of the square, a bloodied man with torn clothes was being insulted by a small crowd: “Kill. Skin him. IT’S PIDE. He’s a snitch”. In front of him, a soldier, just one, defended the man. He wouldn’t let anyone get close. He stood bravely until a vehicle arrived and took the man away. That soldier showed April’s generosity and courage. Shortly afterward, I hear Francisco Sousa Tavares, megaphone in hand, on top of a sentry box in the Carmo Barracks. You can’t hear a word he says. But we applaud anyway. The party was in the streets. Sophia de Mello Breyner’s initial day was born whole and clean at that time. It was joy again. The deep conviction that everything depended on us. Afterwards? There was no after. Only now. That dawn was forever. Definitive. Better to be innocent for a moment than cynical all your life. There was only the present. Even the future was present. April is the courage of beginnings. That first step in which, according to Vladimir Jankélévitch, the whole path is already there. The April military knew how to be restless because “freedom is free at the moment it shakes and breaks the chains; freedom is free at the moment of liberation.”
In a country of lost opportunities, of failed possibilities, April kept all its promises. The rest is up to us. It’s up to us with our weaknesses and incapacities. Don’t blame April for things that April doesn’t have. “Freedom is always experimental.” Courage is going to the limit of our possibilities. Overcoming. We have a responsibility to try. There is no perfect freedom. That’s good. Imperfection makes room for hope. That early morning, happiness didn’t lie in having or even being but in doing. The important thing was to act and also to imagine. The photographs don’t lie. April was made in the streets. We knew nothing. So we could learn everything. In life, we have the right to a dawn. I lived intensely the dawn that life gave me.

THE LIBERATING FREEDOM

The meaning of life lies in freedom, which is made with others. As Jorge Sampaio told us, “Solidarity is not optional; it is a duty.” The liberty of April was more than free; it was liberating. On that day, another era was born. We believed in a different history without the usual fatalities. We thought that we could choose, that is, build, a different destiny. Freedom gave us democracy. No doubt about it. But we can’t ignore that, in recent years, Portugal has fallen in the comparative indicators of democracy. Above all, because of the lack of civic participation, there is an inability to add involvement to representative democracy. Freedom has allowed us to develop. No doubt about it. However, we can’t ignore that Portugal continues to show major economic weaknesses and profound social inequalities. We don’t seem to be able to maintain a course of continuity that moves us away from mediocrity and poverty. We are a tired and blocked country, sailing in plain sight. A country with a severe problem of trust in its institutions. A country entangled in a web of inertia, unbelieving, without a thought for the future. We need to renew April’s liberating freedom. Half a century of life “Before” was no better.

Published originally in Portuguese in o Referêncial