My dad, in 1967, as a uni student in Lisbon, chairing a secret meeting against the Students' Council, which had been appointed by the Fascist state.

In 1969 my dad would get drafted to fight in the African colonies.

On the 25th of April, 1974, a revolution would topple Fascism.

He was born shortly after his own father's imprisonment, for being a communist. My grandmother had to raise him (and her two other kids, from a previous marriage to a man who died of tuberculosis) alone, initially, in a world where women could barely make a living on their own.

The Fascist dictatorship, which lasted 48 years, literally shaped my family in countless ways. My own mother's side has a story of its own - darker, as her parents were pro-Fascist and worked to perpetuate the dark tendrils of its oppression.

It's almost impossible not to meet a Portuguese family without its own share of stories relating to the dictatorship. Even I, born 17 years after the 25th of April of 1974, have been shaped by these events.

Today we celebrate another anniversary of the Carnation Revolution