Leaders of Cambridge's Portuguese community yesterday expressed happiness with last week's military coup against the Portuguese dictatorship of Marcelo Caetano, and said they believed that change had been needed and coming for a long time.

"The reaction of our community is--on the whole I think it's quite favorable," Father Jose Ferrera, a priest at St. Anthony's Church on Portland Street, said last night. "They greeted me in the morning and said, 'Congratulations!'"

Ruben Cabral, executive director of Cambridge Organized Portuguese Americans, could not be reached for comment yesterday, but Ferrera said Cabral was happy with the news from Portugal.

"The news that we've got is very sparse and we haven't heard anything officially yet, just what we've read in the newspapers," Maurino Costa, another active member of COPA, said yesterday, "so I don't think COPA can say anything."

But Costa added, "I think it's something everyone has been waiting for a long time to hear and I think the change is for the better--we're sure the change is for the better."

Ferrera said he thought many Portuguese here accepted official "propaganda" that Portugal could not survive if its African colonies won complete independence. But he said few of them supported Caetano.

"There was no free speech, no free press--they brainwashed the Portuguese people," Ferrera explained. "But people were fed up of these things and of the war overseas--they talked about nationalism, patriotism, all this stuff, but soldiers would come home with no more legs."

"There were some priests in prison," Ferrera--who came to Cambridge from northern Portugal six months ago--continued. "There was a young priest, a nice priest, near my place where I came from, and he was put in prison merely for teaching the Gospel and when he preached about peace talking a little against the government because it was not following the Gospel."

"There has been unrest for a long time, more than ten years," Ferrera said. "Most people have felt for a long time that radical change was needed--one or two tell me, 'it is very good, and what was before was very good,' but in my opinion most people are happy.