Celeste Cairo, the waitress who baptized the Carnation Revolution and fell into obscurity, has died. international

Celeste Caro, the waitress who unknowingly baptized the Carnation Revolution 50 years ago, died this Friday of respiratory failure in a hospital in Leiria (Portugal). She received a pitiful pension, causing her to go through the same difficulties as a retired person that she had gone through during her active life as a single mother. He was 91 and never received an official tribute. A work was in progress, unanimously approved by the Lisbon City Council this year, to create an interment in his memory in some public spaces in the city, but Cairão died without seeing it. At that ceremony he was awarded the Lisbon Medal of Honor, the only honor awarded to him in half a century.

There was both chance and poetry in his gesture of distributing carnations among the soldiers rebelling against the dictatorship and it immediately became the perfect symbol to baptize that revolution marked by pacifism. The oblivion of Celeste Cairo perhaps better than any other reveals the amnesia of Portuguese democracy towards those who, with gestures – big ones like taking up arms or small ones like distributing flowers – marked that day. Made it possible to create an almost complete revolution. Hardly any violence or revenge. His story is compiled in the documentary Celeste Do CravosReleased this year to commemorate 50 years of the Portuguese Revolution.

In 1974 Celeste Cairo, who eventually joined the Portuguese Communist Party, worked at the Franzinhas restaurant near Marqués de Pombal Square in Lisbon. On Thursday, April 25, the business celebrated its first anniversary and the owner had purchased flowers to deliver to the tables. When the employee arrived at the establishment, the boss explained that he had decided not to open due to events taking place in the city. Many military units moved from various locations and occupied strategic positions in the Portuguese capital. The coup, which was carried out mainly by middle managers of the army who were tired of fighting three colonial wars in Africa, achieved victory within a matter of hours. Celeste returned home with bunches of Cairo carnations.

At Rossio Square they were met by the soldiers of the column of the Santarém Practical Cavalry School, which had traveled about a hundred kilometers that night to capture strategic institutions in the center of Lisbon under the command of Captain Fernando Salgueiro. Cairo said years later that he asked a militiaman what they were doing and he replied that they were headed to Largo do Carmo, where dictator Marcelo Caetano was taking refuge. The waitress asked him if he needed anything and he asked her for a cigarette. “My grandmother doesn’t smoke, she never smoked, she looked around because there was a tobacconist there, but it was early and it was still closed. Taking pity on her and not wanting to leave her with anything, she told him that she had no cigarettes, but she had a carnation. The soldier took it and put it in the muzzle of his rifle,” Carolina Chiaro Fontella, the hero’s granddaughter, recalled in an article published May 2 in a local newspaper. or Alcoa,

He then distributed the remainder among other soldiers, including Manuel Correia da Silva, a sergeant who hours later would guard Marcelo Caetano in the armored vehicle in which he left the Do Carmo barracks after the overthrow of power. “Then they only talked about red carnations, but I remember I also had white carnations,” Correia recalled in an interview with EL País a year earlier.

At a demonstration held in Lisbon this year to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Revolution, Celeste Caeiro once again distributed carnations from a wheelchair pushed by her granddaughter. He took photos with the army and with some of the thousands of people who took to the streets to remember the day that restored their freedoms after almost half a century of dictatorship. In May he also went to see a sporting match, his favorite club, shortly before a popular fundraiser promoted by his granddaughter on social networks allowed him to buy new hearing aids. The uncertainty in which he lived remained constant in his life. “But you always rolled up your sleeves and overcame everything,” Carolina Cairo Fontella emphasized in that article.

Celeste Martins Cairo was born on May 2, 1933 in Lisbon. When the military coup broke out in April, he lived with his daughter and mother Street Do the work. That house would burn down in a fire a few years later, leaving nothing on the street. Despite facing many material obstacles, he did not accept resentment. According to his granddaughter, his main legacy: “You taught me from a young age that I should be what I want, that no one should make decisions for me and certainly not silence me because we all have something to contribute.” There’s something important to do.”