Aida Magro

She was born in 1918 in Gambos, in Huíla, Angola, and came to Lisbon to study chemistry at the Industrial Institute, where she joined the student struggle against the dictatorship.² She joined the PCP in 1942 and three years later went underground,¹ when her husband, José Magro, was denounced to the PIDE; she took her daughter, still a baby, with her, and later handed her over to the family.²

Underground, she was in charge of the Eastern Zone of the Lisbon Local Committee, “the most important working-class zone of the capital”; she carried illegal documents and wrote, under the pseudonym “Eva”, for the party’s clandestine publications, among them A Voz das Camaradas (The Voice of the Women Comrades).¹ Like the other women in the clandestine houses, it was also her job to keep the house safe and to keep up a cover routine that would not arouse the neighbours’ suspicions.²

She was arrested by the PIDE on 27 May 1957, in the Bairro Lopes,¹⁴ and taken to Caxias prison, where she spent six months in isolation and under interrogation.²⁴ Given a custodial sentence of two and a half years, with her political rights suspended for 15 years and security measures, because she was considered a “dangerous element”,¹ she was only released on 2 February 1963, almost six years later, at the age of 44; in all that time she never saw her husband, imprisoned in the same fort.²⁴ In prison she read and discussed the news with the other women prisoners, and was one of the authors of the thirteen letters of the Caxias Manifesto,¹ which Maria Alda Nogueira smuggled out of the prison in May 1961, addressed to women’s and democratic organisations all over the world.³¹

On parole, she had to report to the PIDE every month and could not leave Lisbon without permission, not even to visit her husband, imprisoned again in Peniche.² Unable to work as an engineer, she even sold coffee machines; she devoted herself to supporting political prisoners and their families, in the National Commission for Aid to Political Prisoners.¹ In 1973 she wrote to Marcelo Caetano asking for the release of her husband, who was ill, and for an amnesty for political prisoners; he was only freed with 25 April. After the revolution she was a full-time PCP worker, and she died in Lisbon on 11 November 2011.² Her papers have been digitised at the 25 April Documentation Centre of the University of Coimbra, and the originals have been in the Torre do Tombo since 2007.¹