Luís Cabral

Who is Luís Cabral?

Luís Severino de Almeida Cabral was born on 11 April 1931 in Bissau, in what was then Portuguese Guinea, to a family of Cape Verdean descent. He trained as an accountant and worked for a Portuguese trading company before co-founding the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) in 1956 alongside his half-brother, Amílcar Cabral. He helped organize the 1959 Pidjiguiti dockworkers' strike, which Portuguese police violently suppressed, and afterward took an active role in building the party's guerrilla resistance during the war of independence. When Amílcar Cabral was assassinated in Conakry in January 1973, Luís Cabral took over leadership of the PAIGC's branch in Guinea-Bissau and became the country's first president after Portugal formally recognized independence on 10 September 1974. His government pursued a program of socialist-inspired reconstruction with support from the Soviet Union, China, and Nordic countries, expanding access to education and healthcare. He was overthrown in a November 1980 military coup led by João Bernardo Vieira and later lived in exile before eventually settling in Portugal, where he died on 30 May 2009.

Sources: BlackPast.org, "Luis Cabral (1931-2009)" · Patrick Chabal, Amílcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and People's War (Cambridge University Press, 1983)