Celeste Cairo, the woman who gave name to the revolution in Portugal with her carnation, passes away

Celeste Cairo, the woman who gave her name to the revolution in Portugal with her carnation, died this Friday at the age of 91, her granddaughter Carol confirmed on her social networks. Cairo’s death came as this year, on April 25, marked the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, which ended the dictatorship.

Born to a Spanish mother, this woman worked in the kitchen of “Cefire”, a restaurant in the center of Lisbon at the time of the rebellion. As he himself explained in an interview with EFE in 2014, the owner of the restaurant wanted to organize a party on 25 April 1974 to celebrate the first anniversary of the establishment and had bought flowers.

When she arrived at work that day, she found the door closed and the manager told her and the rest of the staff not to open the door because a revolution was taking place and that they should take away the flowers so they would not be spoiled.

Against the advice of his masters, Cairo decided not to go straight home and find out what was going on, but not before getting several red and white carnations under his arm. He took the metro to Lisbon’s Rossio Square, right at the beginning of Largo do Carmo, where rebel tanks had been standing in tense anticipation since the morning for new orders. “I looked at them and said to a soldier: What is this, what are you doing here? According to the story Cairo provided to EFE, he responded, ‘We are going to the Carmo barracks, where President (successor to the Salazar regime) Marcelo Caetano is.’

It was around nine in the morning and the constable, who had already been on guard duty for a few hours, asked the woman for a cigarette. Since she did not smoke, but felt bad about not being able to help the soldier, she offered him one of the carnations she had. “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 reach out his hand, grab the carnation and put it in his rifle,” she said herself. Immediately, the rest of the soldiers copied their comrade and took those red and white carnations from the woman. One of the manga, which she carried under her arm until they were all delivered.

She, a member of the Communist Party, did not expect that with that simple gesture she would enter the history books. And hours after that incident, many flower sellers worked hard to ensure that no one was left without carnations, helping turn them into a symbol of freedom.

This act of his gave birth to a revolution which is remembered for the absence of bloodshed.