I stole (I admit it, mis disculpas, Claudia, but else do we Spaniards do, right?) this from another blog:

On the April 25th 1974 a revolution took place in Portugal; a 40 something year old dictatorship was overthrown. Here is why it's called the Red Carnation Revolution.

I think everyone can imagine (if not experienced) the atrocities and the general repression of a dictatorship in every section of society. Here's some trivia on the dictatorship and how it prevented the people to access information and culture; as usual, I prefer to talk about things that make me laugh (even if bitterly):

- The Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci), A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick) and many other movies were not shown in Portugal because of censorship; here's my favourite argument against a movie (sarcasm here, of course):

Oh! What a Lovely War by Richard Attenborough (a musical!) - "We do not approve this movie because it's a cruel story against war."

- The secret police would invade people's homes and apprehend subversive books (and often the owner); the problem was that, in a country with a minimal alphabetization rate, was hard to find capable employees:

One police agent once apprehended a book by Racine saying "Racine, Estaline, Lenine, it's everything the same!"

- When the soviets launched the world's first artificial satellite Sputnik in 1957, the newspapers published an interview with a patriotic astronomer that said that it was all a lie;

- Coca-cola was forbidden; the dictator Salazar wrote to the company's representative: "Portugal is a rural, paternalistic acountry and - praise the Lord- underdeveloped, an expression that I find more flattering than pejorative. I tremble at the thought of your big trucks driving at all speed through the streets of our old cities, accelerating, as they drive by, the rhythm of our centuries old habits.";

- in 1961, 10 people arrested by the secret police for political reasons escape from prison using the bullet-proof car that belonged to Salazar;

On a sidenote(or Harry Potter trivia :-)), J.K.Rowling spent some years in Portugal, teaching english and that's why the founder of the Slytherin at Hogwart's is called Salazar (the bad guy!!).