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)