Doca de Alcântara (the attack on the freighter “Cunene”)

Armed Revolutionary Action (ARA) was the armed wing of the Portuguese Communist Party, active from 1970 to 1973, to fight against the colonial war, overthrow the dictatorship and win freedom. Its first action, studied and decided on in the central command by Jaime Serra, Francisco Miguel and Raimundo Narciso, targeted the freighter Cunene, which supplied the colonial troops with weapons and other goods.¹ Among the group that set up the ARA, in 1970, was Maria Machado, who took part in preparing several actions; the Aljube Museum does not say which.³

Jaime Serra, of the central command, told the story of the operation in a book published in 1999. Gabriel Pedro — an old communist activist who had spent years in prison at Tarrafal and had come back clandestinely from France — took a boat out of the Poço do Bispo dock; with Carlos Coutinho, who was in charge of the action, he rowed for hours down the river, with fishing tackle as a disguise, evading a Maritime Police launch. Alongside the Cunene, they attached to the hull, half a metre below the waterline, two magnetic charges set to go off at four in the morning, and got away by jumping from boat to boat to the quay.⁴ Serra places the ship at the Rocha do Conde de Óbidos quay; O Século of 27 October, which he himself quotes, says it was “moored at the north wall of the Alcântara dock” — the location also given by the ARA communiqué, and the one followed here. According to Wikipedia, the original target was the liner Vera Cruz, which Serra does not mention.⁴²

The ARA communiqué, dated 26 October, announced that the 16,000-ton Cunene, “used to feed the colonial war”, had been left “flooded and immobilised in the Alcântara dock, in Lisbon, with a large hole”.¹² The next day, the newspapers reported the explosions: according to O Século (The Century), the first came before five in the morning and the second a few minutes later, and they woke thousands of people in Alcântara; the crew managed to pump out the water with the ship’s own pumps.⁴ The captain put them down to “a diesel pipe or gases in the hold”.²

Other actions followed: the destruction, in the port of Lisbon, of equipment bound for the colonial army; that of the cultural centre of the United States embassy; that of the helicopter fleet at the Tancos air base; the cutting of radio-telegraph and telephone communications; and the destruction of part of the NATO headquarters in Oeiras.¹