Chris Haralam is not a diplomat. But he spent his winter vacation touring Cuba, a country most Americans could be fined or jailed up to 10 years for visiting.
The Spokane English teacher bicycled through Havana with Cuban students. He met with the head of the Catholic Church there and got a glimpse inside ordinary people's medicine cabinets. ("No aspirin.")
Since returning last month, he's talked to members of Congress, teachers and trade groups on life there.
Haralam isn't with the government. He isn't even fluent in Spanish. He's a traveler who went on a "reality tour," an organized trip to one of the world's political hot spots.
This year, Global Exchange, the non-profit agency Haralam traveled through, will lead a dozen reality tours to Cuba. The group has already legally escorted more than 1,000 Americans there, despite the ever-tightening U.S. trade and travel embargo.
Other reality tours in 1996 include trips to monitor the peace process in Northern Ireland; to study the economic and political transformation in the Czech Republic, and to monitor presidential elections in Nicaragua.
Think of the last place on Earth you're likely to visit, and Global Exchange can probably take you there. Peacefully, safely and often, with three-star hotel accommodations.
"It's a Club Med alternative where you go and see what's happening at the grassroots level," said staff member Tony Newman from the group's San Francisco office.
Trips are open to anyone and can include their share of beach time or dancing; Haralam stayed in a new hotel and saw beautiful beaches. But, with his own translator and access to scientists, day-care operators and organic farmers, he was clearly on a non-stop seminar.
"It was like a 10-day conference on Cuba," he said.
Unlike getaways to isolated tourist resorts, reality tours show countries and their people as they really are, Global Exchange staff say.
You could term it politically correct travel. Rodrigo Gonzales calls it fair-trade travel.
"It's a chance for U.S. citizens to learn about those countries and people on the ground to learn about us," the staff member said.
Global Exchange was founded eight years ago at the height of the Cold War and U.S. intervention in Central America. Its mission is to study, educate and change U.S. foreign policy, said co-director Medea Benjamin, an economist and nutritionist who worked for two decades for the United Nations and World Health Organization.
Early trips drew activists and liberals. Today's trips attract far more political conservatives and apolitical people with a wider range of interests, from medicine to economics, she said. The group being escorted to Cuba next week, for instance, are business people.
Many of the 40 annual trips are seminars on language and culture, or research forays on health, economies or farming (often co-sponsored by such groups as the American Health Association).
Global Exchange took 100 women to September's U.N. conference on women in Beijing. Travelers can monitor elections in emerging democracies such as Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Monitors typically meet with political parties, unions and women's groups before the election, observe the process, produce a report and hold a press conference afterward.
"People think only very official government people or human rights lawyers would be qualified to monitor elections; we've found the opposite to be true," Benjamin said.
She said such successes are based on close relationships with people in dozens of countries.
"We've been in some very difficult places, but we're invited there by the people. We're not going in as gringos; we have hosts that guide us," said Gonzales.
In fact, the agency's uniqueness may be the extraordinary access it gets to ordinary people.
