Celeste Caeiro, the woman who gave her name to the revolution in Portugal with her carnations, died this Friday at the age of 91, her granddaughter Carol confirmed on her social networks. Caeiro’s death occurred when this year, on April 25, marked the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, which put an end to the dictatorship.
Born to a Spanish mother, this woman worked in the closet of a restaurant in the center of Lisbon, the “Sifire”, when the uprising occurred. As she herself explained in an interview with EFE in 2014, the owners of the restaurant wanted to have a party on April 25, 1974 to celebrate the first anniversary of the establishment and they had bought flowers.
That day when she arrived at work, she found the door closed and the manager told her and the rest of the employees that they were not going to open because a revolution was taking place and that they should take the flowers so they would not spoil.
Against the advice of his bosses, Caeiro decided not to go directly home and find out what was happening, but not before taking several red and white carnations under his arm. He went by metro to Lisbon’s Rossio Square, right at the beginning of Largo do Carmo, where the tanks of the rebels were awaiting new orders in a tense wait since dawn. “I looked at them and said to a soldier: What is this, what are you doing here? ‘We are going to the Carmo Barracks, where Marcello Caetano, the president (heir to the Salazar regime) is,’ they responded, according to the story that Caeiro gave to EFE.
It was around nine in the morning and the soldier, who had already been on guard for a few hours, asked the woman for a cigarette. Since she did not smoke, but felt bad for not being able to help the soldier, she offered him one of the carnations she had with her. “I picked up a carnation, the first one was red, and he accepted it. Since I’m so small and he was on top of the tank, he had to stretch out his arm, grab the carnation and place it in his rifle,” she said herself. Immediately, the rest of the soldiers imitated their companion and asked the woman for one of those red and white carnations, which she was carrying under her arm, until they were all distributed.
She, a member of the Communist Party, did not expect that with that simple gesture she would go down in the history books. And hours after that episode, several florists worked hard to ensure that no one was missing a carnation, helping to turn them into an icon of freedom.
His act gave name to a revolution that is remembered for the absence of bloodshed.
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