The author, born in 1951 in Bissau, Guinea (renamed Guinea-Bissau in 1974),  was part of the Secretariat of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde, and currently writes about African events for the Portuguese Communist Party weekly newspaper Avante. There are two countries on the West Coast of Africa named Guinea, which are differentiated by the name of their capital, thus are called Guinea-Bissau and Guinea-Conakry. This article was published June 26, 2025. Translation: John Catalinotto, lightly edited.

Cabo Verde will celebrate the 50th anniversary of its independence in a few days.

On July 5, 1975, in the city of Praia, the president of the newly elected national assembly, Abílio Duarte, solemnly proclaimed — on behalf of the Cabo Verdean people — the Republic of Cabo Verde, “an independent and sovereign nation.”

Quite rightly, the declaration emphasized: “We, the people of the Islands, have broken the chains of colonial subjugation and freely chosen our African destiny. And history will remember that the sons of our glorious people of Cabo Verde, who fought valiantly on the front lines of the armed struggle in Guinea [Bissau], were ready and determined to take up arms in Cabo Verde as well, if this proved to be the only way to liberate our beloved islands.”

The reference to armed combat in Cabo Verde refers to interesting historical facts, albeit little known, about the struggle for emancipation by Cabo Verdean patriots.

In the late 1950s, Amílcar Cabral founded the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde (PAIGC) in the city of Bissau, which took root in the country of Guinea-Bissau [on the mainland of Africa]. An innovator, he did not hesitate to bring together in the same organization patriots from two peoples united by a common past and aspiring to a shared future.

The national liberation struggle, which began in 1963, developed rapidly in

Guinea-Bissau and took the form of clandestine resistance in Cabo Verde, with plans to also launch the war of liberation in the archipelago.

In early 1965, [the Argentinian-Cuban Revolutionary leader] Che Guevara made a long trip through Africa and met with Amílcar Cabral in Conakry, in the Republic of Guinea. From that meeting onwards, cooperation between the PAIGC and Cuba intensified.

In January 1966, Amílcar Cabral and a delegation from the party participated in Havana in the First Conference of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Cabral held lengthy talks with Fidel Castro and traveled with him around the island. Cuba sent doctors and military advisers to the liberated areas of Guinea-Bissau to support the independence fighters.

At the same time, Cuba secretly welcomed a group of three dozen Cabo Verdean cadres (led by Pedro Pires, who after independence would become prime minister and president of the Republic of Cabo Verde), who received military training for about two years. The objective was, once they had completed their training, to organize a naval landing of PAIGC guerrilla fighters on one of the islands of Cabo Verde (either Santo Antão or Santiago, which are both mountainous) and, with the support of the party’s local clandestine organization, to extend the armed struggle to the archipelago.

At the end of 1967, however, Amílcar Cabral and the PAIGC leadership decided to postpone, but not cancel, the landing plan. They continued to build the party’s navy and develop the clandestine network in the islands, despite increased repression by the [Portuguese] fascist and colonialist dictatorship.

The Cabo Verdean combatants trained in Cuba, patriots and internationalists, joined the guerrilla movement in Guinea-Bissau, contributed to the victories achieved there and reinforced the conviction of the profound interconnection between the political and armed struggles waged on different fronts (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe) against their common enemy, Portuguese colonialism.