蜜芽传媒

Good morning. As we heard on this programme yesterday Cuba still arouses strong feelings. On the one hand there are severe restrictions on personal freedoms, with political opponents of the regime still in jail. On the other hand Cuba鈥檚 outstanding medical service is put at the service of the rest of the world. Since the revolution in 1959 30,000 health professionals have been deployed in 103 countries. More than 250 Cuban are now fighting Ebola in West Africa, more than any other country.

What we have in Cuba is just one example of an issue which dominated the 20th century and which is still present with us in one form or another. It is what happens when a self-selected elite obtains power and seeks to rule in the name of a greater justice-that justice might be ideological as in Cuba, political as in Putin鈥檚 Russia or religious. The key point is that those in power decide what this justice is. What they forget is that all our human motives are mixed, that however sincere we think we are there will almost certainly be an element of self-interest, and we will try to hang on to power if we feel our self-interest is threatened. It is an example of what the Christian Church means by that very unfashionable word 鈥淥riginal sin鈥�-though as someone once said it is in fact the one Christian doctrine we should have no problem at all in believing. That鈥檚 why no elite, however seemingly wise or good, should be trusted with absolute power. Liberty, said Thomas Hobbes, is power cut up into little pieces.

But if it is all cut up into little pieces, with everyone out for themselves, what happens to justice for the weak?

One of my intellectual heroes is the American thinker Reinhold Niebuhr. He once wrote
Man鈥檚 capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man鈥檚 inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

There is a strain of decency in every human being, a desire for justice-and that is the positive argument for democracy. But the inclination to injustice also has to be taken into account. Because no elite can be totally trusted there must be checks and balances on governments and in the end a way of getting rid of them peacefully.

Cuba may not have got it right yet. Nevertheless is there something other societies, including our own, can learn from them?- In how we can best hold together those two crucial values of liberty and justice?

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