Duarte Mendes, the 1975 song festival, won with the leader of April, with the topic dawn. I remembered the verses that the song begins with those who resisted the regime: “From those who died without knowing the reason / those who insisted in a cold and cold.”
Dennis Miranda, born in 1929 in the village of Monto, was not in Redondo municipality who died without knowing the reason, because he would already die in democracy. However, those who insisted in silence and cold, and 12 years who have passed in fascism arrests are evidence of this.
It also punished the incendiary sun that burned the Land of ALENTEJO, the skin of those who worked from Dawn to Night Fall, for a journey of misery. Dennis Miranda felt his body and spirit the weight of this injustice and exploitation whose people were the subject, so he chooses the path of resistance. At the age of 17 he joins the Portuguese Communist Party. Since then, several chains of prisons have succeeded. It was beaten by PIDE for three days and three nights. Served to torture of the statue for 30 hours; He suffered from torture of sleep for 15 days and 15 nights. It was not broken. He did not speak. Resist.
The reason is that Dennis himself remained silent in his trial in 1968: “I am not a coward and put everything in my generosity and sincerity.
The crime often arrested was the same one that took many others: to say no. Not accepting persecution, not bending before tyranny, and not burying your head in the sand and saying: “Nothing is for me, nothing for me.” They arrested him because he refused to be a partner of injustice. Because he had the courage to resist and face fear and pain for the dignity of the people. How many of us could do the same?
He was lastly arrested in 1970 and sentenced to nine months in prison, but Einstein was right when he said that time was relative. When Renaskina Radio, in midnight, April 25, 1974 passed, music Grândola Vila MERNADennis Miranda was still in prison in Peniche.
But the revolution was made, the gun is full of blackheads, men smiling, song atmosphere, and prison doors. On April 27, 1974, prisoners of Peniche Fort and Reading in the newspaper Republic On the same day: “The first thing that was arrested to leave the fort was Dennis Miranda, 23 minutes passed from midnight.” Dinis iconic image with his arms on the top is the icon of liberating an entire nation. Dennis Miranda once again breathed the fresh air in a country, already without a gag, finally breathing freedom.
However, the revolution did not distinguish the end of the political action of this Montoitense. He was responsible for the establishment of agricultural unions in Alentejo, and he was elected as a deputy of the Constituent Assembly and the Republic Association, and for several years, he was president of the municipal association in Redondo.
We owe Dennis Miranda (and a lot of the way he fought) the freedom we have today. But this freedom was not a gift, it was a legacy. And legacies require care. They demand not to forget the price that was necessary to pay for freedom; Let’s not forget everyone who abandoned the future so that we can get it; Let’s not forget those who are silent in torture so that we can scream in the streets today.
The shades that appear only grow with forgetfulness. Let’s do, then, from memory to our resistance. And let us remember that in a world full of screaming longing, the screaming that matters is the screaming that was made in harmony and arm offered by everyone who call firmly, that April 25 is forever and fascist again.
