Reality Check Company Organizes Trips To The World’s Politcal Hot Spots

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.

Haralam, who is 42, married and the father of an adopted daughter from Latin America, was generally interested in Cuba and wanted to learn more when he signed up. He expected and found a totalitarian dictatorship but hardly the Stalinist monolith he’d read about.

“It verified that Cuba is a shade of gray, and it’s always presented as a black and white,” Haralam said. “I learned how absolutely complex the situation there is.”

He discovered enterprising organic farmers, a 95 percent literacy rate and the world’s highest number of teachers per capita. He left deeply disturbed that Congress has voted to further tighten one of the world’s longest trade embargoes (since 1961). Between the fall of the Eastern bloc and further 1992 U.S. restrictions, the lack of food and medicine has cost Cubans an average of 30 pounds each and driven up infant mortality, all while costing U.S business billions in trade, as Canadian and European businesses flock there.

Haralam has been sharing his insights with Spokane business people and churchgoers. Such discussions are the result of getting to know people firsthand, Benjamin said.

Personal contact has led Global Exchange to start scholarships for rural women in Vietnam and revolving loan funds for businesses in Cambodia. In Cuba, it helped start soy-product factories to combat malnutrition “as we would anywhere,” Benjamin said.

“In the case of Cuba it happens to be illegal, but we obey a higher law. We feel we should feed children anywhere.”

While their trips to Cuba have generally fit within allowed travel for researchers, relatives of Cubans and journalists, Global Exchange is also challenging current U.S. travel restrictions. Through its Freedom to Travel Campaign, Global Exchange is fighting the restrictions as unconstitutional in a case now before the U.S. Court of Appeals.

But Benjamin said the impact of reality tourism is mostly felt in individual lives.

“I know when I was younger, I’d go to a country and lie on a beach, and I could hardly tell six months later where I’d been,” she said. “This gives people a sense of purpose, a connection and a sense of humanity.”

Reality tourists are often struck by the richness of other cultures, the sense of community and strong family values. They come home and ask how they can live differently, she said. “When you see a family of 10 living in a shack, you feel your walk-in closet is a luxury. You get the sense we don’t need as much to be happy.”

For more information on Reality Tours, call (800) 497-1994.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Staff illustration by Charles Waltmire