:12:04
Amilcar Cabral was the only one to lead a victorious guerrilla war,
:12:07
and not only in terms of military conquests.
:12:10
He knew his people,
he had studied them for a long time,
:12:12
and he wanted every liberated region
to be also the precursor of a different kind of society.
:12:15
The socialist countries send weapons to arm the fighters.
:12:18
The social democracies fill the People's Stores.
:12:21
May the extreme left forgive history
but if the guerrillas are like fish in water
:12:26
it's a bit thanks to Sweden.
:12:29
Amilcar was not afraid of ambiguitieshe knew the traps.
:12:32
He wrote: "It's as though we were at the edge of a great river full of waves and storms,
:12:38
with people who are trying to cross it and drown,
but they have no other way out, they must get to the other side."
:13:02
And now, the scene moves to Cassaque:
the seventeenth of February, 1980.
:13:05
But to understand it properly one must move forward in time.
:13:08
In a year Luis Cabral the president will be in prison,
:13:11
and the weeping man he has just decorated,
major Nino, will have taken power.
:13:16
The party will have split, Guineans and Cape Verdeans separated one from the other
will be fighting over Amilcar's legacy.
:13:22
We will learn that behind this ceremony of promotions
which in the eyes of visitors perpetuated the brotherhood of the struggle,
:13:28
there lay a pit of post-victory bitterness,
and that Nino's tears did not express an ex-warrior's emotion,
:13:35
but the wounded pride of a hero who felt
he had not been raised high enough above the others.
:13:42
And beneath each of these faces a memory.
:13:44
And in place of what we were told had been forged
into a collective memory,
:13:48
a thousand memories of men who parade their personal laceration
in the great wound of history.
:13:55
In Portugalraised up in its turn by the breaking wave of Bissau
:13:58
Miguel Torga, who had struggled all his life
against the dictatorship wrote: