Carolina Loff

Carolina Loff da Fonseca (12 November 1911 – 6 March 1999), known as Carolina Loff, was a Portuguese communist activist born in Cape Verde. She participated in the Spanish Civil War for the Communist International and was a member of the Portuguese Communist Party (, PCP). She operated under pseudonyms including Maria Luisa, Berta Mouchet, Marta da Costa and Sylvie. She was expelled from the PCP due to her relationship with a Portuguese secret police inspector, which developed while she was imprisoned for her communist activities.

Biography Loff was born on 12 November 1911 in Praia, Santiago, Cape Verde. Her parents were journalist Carlos Eugénio de Vasconcelos and Ida Loff da Fonseca. Loff's maternal grandfather was allegedly a Russian general who went into exile in Cape Verde, but the reasons for his exile are unknown. Among her maternal great-grandparents were "a Ukrainian by the nickname Loff and the Belgian Lydia Leger."

Loff emigrated to Portugal with her mother when she was aged 15. Loff also joined the Portuguese Communist Party (, PCP). She was a member of the first female communist cell, organized by Wilma Freund.

Loff was arrested for her communist activism for the first time on 6 September 1932, She was imprisoned for a year in the Monastery of the Mónicas and, after her release, began agitating against the authoritarian Estado Novo regime.

While operating in the Second Spanish Republic on the service of the Communist International during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), She was in Spain under a false passport with the name Berta Mouchet and claimed to be a Belgian journalist. On 30 May 1940, Loff was arrested by the International and State Defense Police (, PIDE), Portugal's secret police force. She was expelled from the PCP over the relationship. Ruben de Carvalho's wife Madalena Soares said that: "It was a great love story, they lived together for 10 years. For us, it may be completely incomprehensible. It's difficult to accept that a person like her, with her past, had a romantic relationship with someone without her basic principles."

In 2002, a fictionalised historical romance novel inspired by Loff and Almeida, where they are renamed Zulmira and Esmeraldo, was published. The book was written by Vasco Graça Moura and was titled The Enigma of Zulmira .