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Galvão ordered the Santa Maria to change course and turn east toward St. Lucia, one of Britain's Windward Islands. At 10 a.m. Galvao summoned the passengers to the tapestried first-class lounge, where the seizure was explained in Portuguese and Spanish, with an English resumé added for the benefit of 38 U.S. tourists.
Galvão concluded the meeting by playing Tchaikovsky's militant 1812 Overture on the public address system. The casualties of the fight were put ashore at St. Lucia in a lifeboat manned by six sailors and a male nurse. Then the Santa Maria steamed off into the wide Atlantic.
No Aid. In flowery Portuguese, Galvão radioed his "first official communiqué to all democratic newspapers of the free world." Speaking in the name of "General Humberto Delgado, legally elected President of the Portuguese Republic, who has been fraudulently deprived of his rights by the Salazar administration," Galvão saluted the "oppressed peoples" of Portugal and Spain, swore he had received aid from no foreign government, and added that the capture of the Santa Maria marked the liberation of the first piece of Portuguese "territory."
General Humberto Delgado, 54, Portugal's most celebrated revolutionary, has lived in exile in São Paulo, Brazil for the past two years. An air force general and longtime supporter of the regime, Delgado struck out for himself in 1958 when he broke all the rules by campaigning seriously for the presidency of Portugal in one of Salazar's mock elections. There were plenty of issues to campaign on. After 29 years of Salazar's glacial rule, literacy barely reaches 60%, the tuberculosis rate is almost double that of any other Western European country, and per capita income ranges from $100 to $199 a year—on a level with Libya and below Mexico and Panama.
Delgado told large and tumultuous Portuguese crowds that he represented "the persecuted intellectuals, the abandoned artists, the technicians denied the possibility of giving their best, the muzzled journalists—in fact, all those who in other countries stand for a true level of culture!" The embarrassed Salazar government conceded that Delgado won 23% of the presidential vote and promptly fired him from his job as director of civil aeronautics. Loudly insisting he had actually won the election, Delgado hid out for three months in Lisbon's Brazilian embassy until he got a safe-conduct to leave the country.
Raisins & Wine. Portugal has not been the same since. Salazar's hard-working if often inept secret police keep stumbling on plots and conspiracies. In 1959 they thwarted a coup with the unlikely name of "Operation Cocktail" and rounded up 31 suspects, including nine army officers, a Catholic priest and several professional men. Last year the police pounced on another conspiracy in the African colony of Angola, and 46 persons were tried for treason.