“Wherever there is a Portuguese man or a Portuguese woman, there is Portugal”, said President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa at the annual meeting of the Council of the Portuguese Diaspora, which took place in Cascais, as is tradition, now with Nuno Piteira Lopes as host. My experience as a DN journalist matches what the President of the Republic said, and I can testify that, for example, on a recent trip to California I went to San José, and at Petiscos, one of chef David Costa’s restaurants, I ate a caldo verde and a bifana, with a Superbock on the side. And in the San Joaquin Valley I was with Manuel Eduardo Vieira, a highly successful businessman, to the point of being known as the “sweet potato king”, who arrived in the United States more than half a century ago, raised his children there making sure they grew up speaking Portuguese, and never forgot Pico, the island where he was born, having invested there. I also met with Paulo Afonso, a university professor in Sacramento, who has been investigating the life of João Rodrigues Cabrilho and other Portuguese navigators in the service of Spain, reinforcing the historical version that the European discoverer of California was a Portuguese. And I also met Hugo Bernardo, who went to live in San Francisco, after studying at MIT, and who is part of a new generation of emigrants who work in the financial or technological sector, and who can’t do without a vacation in Portugal every year, to rest and for his children to improve their Portuguese.
Durão Barroso, another of the speakers, also shared his experience of having gone to more than 100 countries and always meeting Portuguese people. He even told, with grace, the story of a trip when he was Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation to the then Zaire, in which he met, near the border of the current Democratic Republic of Congo with Angola, a Portuguese man who traded in timber, and who was chief of a tribe because the previous chief had died and he was married with a daughter. The former president of the European Commission highlighted, however, that today the diaspora is different from the traditional one, as it is increasingly qualified. He also highlighted that the connection to Portugal ends up, sooner or later, bringing fruit to the country.
A few years ago, in another report in the United States, but on the East Coast, I discovered, in a bookstore outside Harvard, a book by an American historian who recalled that Portuguese emigration began in the 15th century, when the country embarked on building an empire. And if the Discoveries brought riches from far away, they also took many Portuguese people far away. “To be born, Portugal: to die, the world” said Father António Vieira, a 17th century Jesuit, born in Lisbon and who lived most of his life in Brazil. And the truth is that, reading history books, we will find Portuguese people in Ethiopia or India 500 years ago, in Burma or Peru 400 years ago, and so on. Above all, many left for Brazil, before and after independence, also for the United States, riding on American whalers that passed through the Azores, and in the 20th century for the so-called African provinces and Europe. The need to combat poverty was the reason for many, but also the desire to see the world motivated thousands and thousands of Portuguese people.
With decolonization, after the 25th of April, one of the country’s sources of wealth continued to be currency remittances from emigrants in France, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, Canada, Brazil and so on. It was estimated that there were three or four million Portuguese people outside Portugal at the time. Today the numbers are smaller, if we only count those born here, but still impressive if we include those of Portuguese descent, although here the emotional relationship with the country varies greatly from case to case. I was pleased to know, on the day I interviewed Ernest Moniz, grandson of Azoreans who was Secretary of Energy during Barack Obama’s Presidency, that he really liked visiting Portugal. And the truth is that even this year the person they called Sir Ernie of Fall River (because of the Portuguese decoration) was in Lisbon.
The Portuguese Diaspora Council was, as can be seen on the official website, “founded under the High Patronage of the President of the Republic, appointed Honorary President of the association, and the Minister of State and Foreign Affairs as Honorary Vice-President”. In that already remote year of 2012, when Aníbal Cavaco Silva was the head of State, the first president of the Diaspora Council was Filipe de Botton, who was present in Cascais. Currently, António Calçada de Sá is at the head of this network that brings together Portuguese people who want to help Portugal, people in the financial and business areas, technology, science, art, etc. Congratulations are to be had for what they do and for their love of Portugal.
As another speaker, João Vale de Almeida, former ambassador of the European Union to the United States, the UN and the United Kingdom, said yesterday in Cascais, we need to counter that idea of the three Ps often associated with Portugal: that we are a small, peripheral and poor country. It is a challenge that should unite the Portuguese inside and outside.
Deputy Director of Diário de Notícias