Remembering Marx

At Highgate…


By New Worker
correspondent

A NEW COMMUNIST Party delegation joined other communists and progressives in saluting the memory of Karl Marx at the annual ceremony in Highgate Cemetery in north London last Sunday.
NCP leaders Andy Brooks and Alex Kempshall, along with Robert Laurie, and Daphne Liddle from the Central Committee represented the New Communist Party, along with New Worker supporters from London. The turnout included Library committee members, members of other communist parties around the world and delegations from the London embassies of socialist countries, including Cuba, People’s China and Vietnam and the Sudan, and Iraq many of whom laid flowers at the grave.
Every year a representatives of the working class movement are asked to give an address and this year Robert Griffiths, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain, opened with a brief tribute to Marx and the Paris Commune. This was then followed by a keynote speech from the Cuban ambassador Esther G Armenteros Cárdenas.
She spoke of her first encounter with the name of Karl Marx as a schoolgirl in Cuba. The day after the Batista regime was thrown out, for the first time she and her schoolfriends were free to play on the beach that had been fenced off for the exclusive use of the very rich – certainly not for young black children from very poor households. As they were playing a small plane from Florida passed over, scattering pamphlets that called on them to fight the new “Marxist dictatorship”.
Comrade Cardenas and her friends were well pleased with the new freedoms and improvements in living standards and within a few weeks, thousands of workers who had never heard of Marx before, were ready and willing to fight to defend their Marxist state – as they did in the Bay of Pigs incident.
The ceremony on Sunday ended fittingly with a rousing chorus of the Internationale!

photo: Andy Brooks at the tomb of Marx