Travelers (and hosts) are personal ambassadors

"I went back and forth between Cuba and the United States a lot at the end of the '80s, when very few people were doing, and I always felt that one good thing I could take to Cuba was a human, balanced sense of what America was like. And one good thing I could bring back from Cuba was a human, balanced sense of what Cuba was like, neither a paradise nor a hellhole but a confounding mixture of them both. And I remember soon thereafter I actually made a practice of going to all the countries that were listed in the U.S. Treasury Department's Trading with the Enemy Act, precisely because I felt they were places I could never learn about sitting in California, that all I would ever read or hear about them would either be propaganda against them or the response to it, which was wild propaganda in favor of them."
--Pico Iyer, in Michael Shapiro's A Sense of Place (2004)