|
|
|
|
|
Lus Cabral - This article is about the former President of Guinea-Bissau. For the evangelist of this name, see Luis Cabral.
Lus de Almeida Cabral (born 10 April 1931), the first President of Guinea-Bissau, served from 1973 to 1980, when a military coup d'tat deposed him. In the early 1960s, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) launched an anti-colonial war that eventually expelled the Portuguese authorities. Lus Cabral's rise to leadership began in 1973, after the assassination in Conakry, Guinea, of his half-brother Amlcar Cabral, the noted Pan-African intellectual and founder of the PAIGC. Leadership of the party, then engaged in fighting for independence from Portuguese rule for both Guinea-Bissau (then known as Portuguese Guinea) and for Cape Verde, fell to Aristides Pereira, who later became the president of Cape Verde. The Guinea-Bissau branch of the party, however, followed Lus Cabral. Following Portugal's revolution in April 1974, it granted independence to Guinea-Bissau on September 10 that same year, although the PAIGC had unilaterally proclaimed the country's independence one year before, and had been recognized by many socialist and non-aligned member states of the United Nations. Lus Cabral became President of Guinea-Bissau. A program of national reconstruction and development, of socialist inspiration (with the support of USSR, China, but also nordic countries), began. But some suspicion and instability was present in the party since Amlcar Cabral's death and the independence. Some sections of the party accused Lus Cabral and the other members with Cape Verdean origins of dominating the party. So, alleging this, Cabral's minister and former armed forces commander Joo Bernardo Vieira organized his overthrow in late 1980 in a military coup. Lus Cabral was then arrested and detained for 13 months. Afterwards, he was sent into exile, first in Cuba, which offered to receive him, then (in 1984), in Portugal, where the government received him and gave him conditions to live with his family, until today. In 1999, after an absence of almost twenty years, he managed to visit his homeland again, after Joo Bernardo Vieira himself was overthrown from power. See also: History of Guinea-Bissau Cabral, Lus Cabral, Lus
|
 |
|
| Copyright 2005-2009 OnPedia.com. All Rights Reserved |
|
|