Luís de Almeida Cabral (1931- ), the first President of Guinea-Bissau, served from 1974 to 1980, when a military coup deposed him.

In the early 1960s, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGCV) began a war that eventually expelled Portuguese colonialists. Luís Cabral's rise to leadership began in 1973, after the assassination in Conakry, in the neighbouring country of Guinea, of his half-brother Amílcar Cabral, the noted Pan-African intellectual and founder of the PAIGCV. Leadership of the party, then engaged in fighting for independence from Portuguese rule for both Guinea-Bissau (then known as Portuguese Guinea) and for Cape Verde, fell to Aristides Pereira, who later became the president of Cape Verde. The Guinea-Bissau branch of the party, however, followed Luís Cabral.

Following Portugal's revolution in April 1974, it granted independence to Guinea-Bissau on September 10 that same year. Luís Cabral became President of Guinea-Bissau. Regional economic turmoil and the program of socialist repression carried out by Cabral's government led to his overthrow in late 1980 in a relatively bloodless coup led by the Prime Minister and former armed forces commander João Bernardo Vieira.