Celeste Caeiro, who on April 25, 1974, handed out red carnations to soldiers on their way to ending a 40-year right-wing dictatorship in Portugal, a spontaneous patriotic act that gave a largely bloodless coup its name, the Carnation Revolution, and her an enduring appellation, “the Lady of the Carnations,” died on Friday in Lisbon. She was 91.
Her granddaughter, Carolina Caeiro Fontela, confirmed her death, in a hospital, to Portugal’s national news agency, Lusa. She said Ms. Caeiro had a history of heart and lung problems.
Ms. Caeiro was a 40-year-old single mother and a cloakroom attendant at a Lisbon restaurant called Sir when she showed up for work that April morning expecting a busy day; it was the restaurant’s first anniversary, and her boss had prepared a special lunch and dinner menu, with red and white carnations on every table.
But since dawn he had been listening to a private radio station — one that had evaded the dictatorship’s censors — and when she arrived he told her that he was closing the restaurant, saying, “Something’s going on.” He told her to take the carnations home. “We don’t want them to go to waste,” he said.
On her way home, Ms. Caeiro saw a column of army tanks and armored personnel carriers rumbling toward her, flanked by infantrymen. Lisbon residents were streaming from their homes to greet them with Portuguese flags. She was told that the soldiers, led by a group of dissident young captains calling themselves the Armed Forces Movement, were determined to oust the dictatorial prime minister, Marcelo Caetano, and his loyal generals.
The officers’s main grievance was the government’s continuing wars against independence movements in colonial Africa, where many if not most poor Portuguese families had lost loved ones in the fighting. The unrest had cost Portugal some 40 percent of its national budget, inflicting hardships on its people.
Amid the euphoria of the uprising, a young soldier asked Ms. Caeiro for a cigarette. She told him she didn’t smoke but gave him a red carnation instead, which he laughingly stuck in the barrel of his rifle.
Other soldiers soon demanded carnations for themselves. An armored car commander put one in the mouth of his vehicle’s cannon. Soon the flowers were sprouting from a host of rifle barrels to the cheers of onlookers. Despite its color, the red carnation became the symbol of what turned out to be an almost-bloodless uprising, although four civilian supporters were shot dead by the secret police that day.
At the time, Prime Minister Caetano and his generals were hiding in the headquarters of the Republican National Guard. After tanks descended on the building, they surrendered by nightfall. People in the street shouted “Liberdade!” and the officers who had seized control became known as the Captains of April.
After the uprising, provisional Portuguese governments came and went, but negotiations began with freedom fighters in the country’s African colonies, all of which eventually gained their independence — Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Angola and Sao Tome and Principe.
The Carnation Revolution led to the first free democratic elections in Portugal, in 1976, with the center-left socialist Mário Soares becoming prime minister.
Today, the country, a member of the European Union, is led by a center-right government, though the far-right Chega party made significant gains in elections this year, a matter of deep concern to many of the so-called Carnation generation.
After the captains’ coup, many Portuguese wondered where the carnations had come from. “Most people assumed they came from a florist,” her granddaughter was once quoted as saying. “But no, they came from my mom.”
Celeste Martins Caeiro was born on May 2, 1933, in the working-class Socorro district of Lisbon. Her father left the family when Celeste was 18 months old, and her mother, Teodora de Viana Martins Caeiro, who was originally from Galicia, in northwest Spain, was forced through penury to put the child in a series of care homes while visiting her regularly.
Ms. Caeiro remained poor into adulthood, finding low-wage work while living in a single room of a rented house with her daughter, Helena, in Lisbon’s poor Chelas neighborhood. In 1988, a fire in a nearby department store and warehouse spread along her street, destroying the home.
“We left with whatever we were wearing, nothing else,” her daughter told the weekly newspaper Expresso in 2018. “We only managed to grab my neighbor’s cat.”
For the next year, Ms. Caeiro and her daughter lived in a community home in Chelas until the City Council helped them rent a house close to Lisbon’s Avenida da Liberdade (Liberty Avenue), where the Carnation Revolution is celebrated every April 25. She spent her later years living on a small state pension with her daughter and granddaughter north of Lisbon.
Ms. Caeiro Fontela, her granddaughter, said Ms. Caeiro had felt neglected by successive Portuguese civilian governments, which she said never officially acknowledged her role in the revolution.
But she had remained something of a legend in Portugal as “the Lady of the Carnations.” Images of her flowers protruding from firearms can be seen in street art peppered across the city, most notably captured by Shepard Fairey — the American artist behind Barack Obama’s “Hope” poster — in a mural in Graca, one of Lisbon’s oldest neighborhoods.
And Ms. Caeiro was hailed when, despite ill health, she attended this year’s 50th anniversary commemorations of the April 25 revolution, carrying bunches of red carnations.
From her wheelchair, she could not reach up to put a flower in the cannon of one of the original armored cars from the coup. Her daughter, Helena Caeiro, and granddaughter — her only immediate survivors — did so for her as they and the crowd shouted the revolutionary slogan “Abril Sempre!” (April Forever!).
On Saturday, Portugal’s military released a statement honoring Ms. Caeiro, saying that with “a simple gesture” she became “the symbol of a movement that changed Portugal forever.”
“Her gesture,” it added, “reminds us that, often, it’s in small actions that begin great transformations.”
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