COLUMN ONE : Portugal: Out of the Shadows : In a graceful rush from oppression to modernity, an isolated dictatorship has become a consumer-driven democracy. Now, citizens worry about preserving the national character amid hubbub of the new Europe.

By WILLIAM D. MONTALBANO

May 20, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

LISBON —

Here are some scenes from the black-and-white yesterday of an ancient land on the western rim of Europe: Portuguese literati traveling to Paris to see movies banned by government censors; thrill-seeking teen-agers crossing the Spanish border (closed at night) to taste Coca-Cola forbidden at home.

“It was another planet; a silent country where people were not allowed to speak and there was nothing to say,” says Isabel Carlos, a 32-year-old art critic. “It was the Portugal of weeping women in black. Today, if we wear black, it’s because black is fashionable.”

In a single generation, Portugal has reversed four centuries of backwardness and isolation to become a democratic, getting-rich partner of the new Europe.

Today, secret police files from the 46-year rule of Western Europe’s longest-lived modern dictatorship drowse in cardboard rows two miles long at the national archives. The files, more voluminous than those compiled during three centuries of the Inquisition, were newly opened for inspection by their victims. But few come to examine them, says archivist Maria de Lourdes Henriques.

The past has passed. With considerable grace and a remarkable absence of rancor, Portugal has digested a peaceful revolution 20 years ago this spring that amounted to a change of century.

No Portuguese will ever forget how the audacious revolt by young officers triggered public jubilation: red carnations in rifle barrels. But what next? The revolution’s anniversary is prompting reflection. Vaulted improbably into the hurly-burly of a consumer society that few imagined, Portuguese increasingly wonder where change will lead them.

Frontiers that have preserved the wholeness of a culture for 900 years, longer than any other land borders on Earth, are increasingly just lines on the map of a united Europe.

Can grilled sardinhas and vinho verde outpoint hot dogs and Gatorade? Portugal’s rush from oppression to modernity to perplexity, like that of Iberian neighbor Spain, may prove an object lesson to the rapidly transforming nations of Eastern Europe.

How much of a singular national character, how many traditions of a small, long-isolated country, can survive the swift, steady onslaught of international values and culture?

Such unsettling questions are part of the price for foreign investment and influence that includes $10 million a day in economic aid to Portugal from its European Union partners through the end of the century.

Whether Portugal risks losing its political identity, and the very essence of its “Portuguese-ness,” is an agenda-setting issue for next month’s elections to the European Parliament.

Still, not many Lisboners strolling the streets of a capital that remains more Old World than high-tech would happily turn back pages in the national diary.

“How lucky we are. We’ve lived 200 years in the last 20,” muses Felipe La Feria, a theater impresario who remembers how censors once scissored his lines when he was a young actor.

As a matter of fact, it is hard to overstate the backwardness of Portugal under dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, who took power in 1928 and ruled in high-polished boots until he was replaced because of illness in 1968. By 1974, when Salazar’s heirs were toppled by the armed forces, Portugal was a rural society, isolated, insular and dirt poor: Per capita income was about $2 per day.

“It was a heavy, closed place. Very codified. There was hardly any contact with the outside world. Nothing happened in Lisbon, and if you wanted something to happen, they wouldn’t let it,” said Paulo Pereira, a 36-year-old museum curator who spent his early teen years worrying about being drafted to fight colonial wars.

Ignored by the world, Portugal huddled by the Atlantic with its back to Europe, preoccupied with a sapping, bloody struggle to preserve a chimerical empire of African colonies: Salazar and his heirs dispatched more than 800,000 young men to Africa to fight in 13 years of colonial conflict that claimed the lives of nearly 9,000 Portuguese soldiers, a loss about four times greater with respect to population than that suffered by the United States in Vietnam.

“War ended the isolation of we military officers from the realities of our country,” said Vasco Lourenco, 51, a leader among the rebellious captains who staged the 1974 revolt.

Political and economic tumult after the April Revolution brought Communists to within an ace of power in 1975. But when socialist Mario Soares, a fierce, indomitable democrat, emerged as prime minister, passions began to ebb.

Not even the Portuguese themselves seem certain why they have been able to absorb the revolution so coolly. Perhaps it is because where Portugal is today is so much better for almost everyone than where it lingered so long.

Then too, Portuguese are fond of pointing out that while they are as rabidly enamored of bullfighting as their neighbors in Spain, they are also different: In Portugal, the bull lives--symbolic, perhaps, of a country in which extremism has fallen from fashion.

“Ours was a generous revolution. There were no trials, but there was a moral judgment,” Soares recently told a group of reporters in explaining the success of Portugal’s political transformation.

Now, as president and graying elder statesman, the 68-year-old Soares is a restive liberal counterpoint to Prime Minister Anibal Cavaco Silva, a free-market moderate who since the mid-1980s has directed landmark growth and Portugal’s integration into the European Union.

Once, intellectual and commercial life languidly unfolded in Lisbon coffee bars. Today, the coffee drinker at the next table is apt to be sipping past her cellular phone.

Francisco Capelo, a former self-described Stalinist “professor of revolution,” is symbolic of a once feisty but now waning left. These days, Capelo is an art-collecting businessman and director of a new private “cheaply commercial” television channel that has won a 30% audience share in its first 18 months.

“I still vote Socialist,” Capelo confided over an expensive bottle of Portuguese wine, “but times have changed. In foreign newspapers I’ve switched from (the French intellectual) Le Monde to the (British business) Financial Times. I no longer have time for theories. I need facts.”

A child of change, the old-fashioned Portuguese language of Salazar’s day now sambas with lively words and images imported from Brazil, to the dismay of the same sort of well-spoken folk who decry the undermining of the Queen’s English by Americanisms. English, in fact, has replaced French as the first foreign language of educated Portuguese.

Almost as an epitaph to Salazar’s portrayal of Portugal as a country that “stands proudly alone,” Lisbon not long ago became the last capital in Western Europe to get a McDonald’s.

Fueled by booming private investment and huge transfusions of European Union cash, Portuguese living standards have increased dramatically over the last 20 years. Per capita income, about $700 at the time of the revolution, is more than $8,000, and Portugal has vaulted past Greece off the bottom rung of the European Union ladder.

In a single generation, infant mortality has fallen from 41 to 6 per 1,000. There are three times as many doctors and university students in Portugal today as there were 20 years ago.

Socially, a rock-ribbed society has become less conservative. The birthrate halved between 1973 and 1993, while divorces jumped from 509 to 12,429. There was one priest for every 4,968 inhabitants in 1973, one for every 12,663 last year, according to a study by Sergio Figueiredo for the Lisbon newspaper Expresso.

Nearly half the Portuguese live in cities today; 20 years ago, three of four still lived on the land. Metropolitan Lisbon, with about 3 million people--nearly a third of the national population--is not much smaller than Rome.

Rapid growth has also brought unwanted change: Massive internal migration from the countryside to cities and the coast has aggravated a profound agricultural crisis and created Latin American-like shantytowns of poor new settlers.

Yesterday’s revolutionaries such as Lourenco say they are generally satisfied with the 20-year result of their handiwork but point to disappointing shortcomings in the rush to join Western Europe’s consumer wonderland.

“We bet on democracy, and I think we have won. We’ve made huge transformations and avoided falling into new dictatorships, but our ideas went beyond formal democracy,” said Lourenco, who runs a small import-export business. “They had a lot to do with social justice, and over time, it must be said, there has been a regression. There is a growing gap between rich and poor. The middle class is shrinking. Social and economic problems are growing. We see the face of racism and xenophobia.”

If the Portuguese are richer than ever, they are still far behind their continental partners economically. National programs of health, welfare, unemployment compensation and retirement pensions are all in crisis.

Crime, trifling by American standards, is higher than ever. AIDS and drugs are unwelcome signposts of the new consumer society. A three-month campaign to exchange old syringes for new, sterilized ones has netted half a million needles.

Young men are no longer killed in distant wars, but with five times as many cars on the roads as in 1974, highway carnage is a matter of national alarm.

The prospect of integration with larger partners is making the Portuguese wonder about their future as a small fish in the big European pond.

“Portugal risks becoming Europe’s favorite busboy,” Soares warned at a conference this month on the nation’s future. “How are we to begin to live as a nation when the European funds run out or decrease significantly? . . . We cannot disguise or ignore the certain sense of anguish gnawing within so many Portuguese as they are faced with growing uncertainty and insecurity.”

Joaquim Vieira, 43, spent 18 months in jail as a teen-age student leader under Salazar and is now a thoughtful Lisbon newspaperman. He says questions about the future color the way politicians are addressing voters.

“Nobody talks about federalism, or pushing the European Union,” he says. “Rather, some people wonder if we’ll become a wholly owned subsidiary of Spain or some multinational corporation. Or perhaps a game reserve where rich Europe comes for sun and beaches.”

There is a realization, Vieira says, that a certain surrender of national individuality is inevitable: “When you open a country to the world it becomes different. The essence of a people remains, but some things become universal--like the use of satellites.”

Nationalists such as Lourenco believe there is no chance that proud, old Portugal will find itself swallowed by Europe. Even after hundreds of years, traditions endure among the descendants of Portuguese settlers in North and South America, he notes.

National traits, such as the love of cod fish-- bacalhau-- and the haunting fado --love poetry set to music--are indelible, he says.

“Despite all the changes, our culture is very strong. We’re a bit like Jews the way we retain our traditions and sense of nationhood,” Lourenco says.

“Sure, our kids will go and eat hamburgers, but they’ll always come home to the bacalhau --they’re Portuguese.”

Portugal Fact Sheet

In the 20 years since its peaceful rvolution against dictatorship, the once-isolated country has become an integral partner of the new Europe

Government: Republic.

Capital: Lisbon

Population: 10.5 million (roughly the population of Ohio)

Religion: 97% Roman Catholic

Unemployment rate: 5%

Literacy rate: 83%

Life expectancy: Male 71, female 78