Luís Cabral

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This article is about the former President of Guinea-Bissau. For the evangelist of this name, see Luis Cabral.

Luís de Almeida Cabral (born 10 April 1931), the first President of Guinea-Bissau, served from 1973 to 1980, when a military coup d'état 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. Luís Cabral's rise to leadership began in 1973, after the assassination in Conakry, Guinea, of his half-brother Amílcar 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 Luís 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. Luís 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 Amílcar Cabral's death and the independence. Some sections of the party accused Luís Cabral and the other members with Cape Verdean origins of dominating the party. So, alleging this, Cabral's minister and former armed forces commander João Bernardo Vieira organized his overthrow in late 1980 in a military coup.

Luís 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 João Bernardo Vieira himself was overthrown from power.