An elderly colleague of mine once told me that the best way to stay fresh and open to new ways of thinking is to travel to at least one place each year where you have never previously visited.  As a geographer, I thought that was excellent advice, and I have tried to follow it as best as I could ever since I heard it.  And so it was that during our Winter Break during the past week, I visited a

place that I have never been to before – Cuba.

I spent most of my time in the capital city, Havana, but I also managed to travel into the rural areas to the west, notably the karst limestone region of Viñales where tobacco and sugar are grown, and the small port town on Regla.  I had a wonderfully invigorating time, walking for many miles each day to regain some fitness and soak up the stunning architecture, studying the rich remains of Cuba’s deeply fascinating history, and just standing for what seemed like ages on street corners simply to enjoy the magnificent sight (and sound) of the thousands of 1950s cars that still dominate Cuba’s roads.

However, rather than writing a travelogue, I want to focus on the bigger picture of travel to ‘forbidden’ places, which is what Cuba is for the majority of American passport-holders (though not, of course, for citizens of most other countries, as shown by the diverse range of planes from Mexico, Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, many parts of South America, and so on, at Havana’s International Airport this week).

I have a long held belief that establishing open communication with people and governments with disparate views is just as important as maintaining dialogue with those holding similar views, and perhaps even more so.  If repressive regimes are going to change, then history shows us that it will be through the force of new ideas brought in by people from outside, not punitive measures that isolate people from the outside world.  Repression tends to flourish when governments have total control over the flow of information and ideas.

That is why in 1991, just two years after the Tian An Men incident in Beijing, I took what many saw as a pioneering step on behalf of the school where I was Head at the time (in Australia) by visiting three schools in China and establishing sister school relationships with them.  This

later expanded into opening a joint venture branch school in the Chinese city of Harbin.  The same belief underpinned my starting the North Korea Goodwill Initiative when I was Head of my previous school in Hong Kong, an initiative that has now seen over 100 ‘student goodwill ambassadors’ visit North Korea on seven group trips with financial support from Rotary International, thus opening up free discussions that paved the way for the first North Korean student to enroll recently in a United World College (in Mostar, having commenced studies in August 2011).  I truly believe that talking, sharing ideas and building understanding are far more effective ways to build peace and prosperity than making threats, cutting off ties and suspending

dialogue, which experience shows usually has the simple effect of pushing the other party into the waiting arms of one’s own enemy.

Strange as it may seem, one of the great inspirations for my thinking on this matter was the former US President, Richard Nixon.  This week marks the 40th anniversary of what I still think was one of the boldest examples of innovative diplomacy that has occurred during my lifetime, this being Nixon’s visit to China in early 1972.  I was still a teenager when Nixon landed in Beijing (or Peking as we knew it back then), but I still remember that day, and his visit still shapes my thinking forty years later.

Given the close, mutually beneficial economic relationships between the US and China today (for example, I am typing this blog on an MacBook Air computer that was made in China), it is difficult to imagine how breathtakingly bold Nixon’s decision

to visit was at that time.  This was the era of Red China with Mao in unassailable control, the Cultural Revolution still underway, with bands of Red Guards waving little red books of Chairman Mao’s thoughts high above their heads.  This was China at a time when not being able to recite Chairman Mao’s sayings, even backwards if necessary, could lead to severe physical punishments.  As a high school student who was about to start university at the time, I watched all this every evening on the television news in flickering black-and-white images – incredulous that this vast experiment to restructure humanity could be happening on the same planet!

To American eyes in 1972, China was seen as ‘a brooding, chaotic, fanatical and alien realm, difficult to comprehend and impossible to sway’.  They are strong words, and they are not the words of an extreme journalist, but the words of President Nixon’s chief foreign policy advisor, Henry Kissinger.  It was into this ‘brooding, chaotic, fanatical and alien realm’ that Nixon reached out.

Although the Communists had ruled mainland China since 1949, the United States refused to recognize them diplomatically and maintained an official illusion that the Nationalists, who fled to Taiwan after losing China's civil war, legitimately controlled the mainland and would one day retake it.  On top of that, the US was still deeply embroiled in a war on China’s southern border in Vietnam.

As for China itself in 1972, it remained driven by the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. For the previous six years, and for four more years after Nixon’s visit, China was a hotbed of political radicalism, where devotion to Chairman Mao had become a religion, where schools and universities were closed so the young could go on rampage as Red Guards, where entertainment

was restricted to a handful of revolutionary dances and operas, where the country was effectively closed to outsiders, and general chaos had brought the economy to a standstill.  Millions of people died, and hardly a family in China remained unaffected by the suffering.  To me, as a high school student in the midst of the Cold War who was struggling to make sense of the almost daily claims by politicians about the dangers we were facing of nuclear war or the infamous ‘domino effect’, the Soviet Union appeared to be the moderate face of communism, whereas China was indisputably the radical extreme.

For Nixon to engage with such a country was undoubtedly a bold move. It shattered the myth of a monolithic communist world and deepened the divide between China and the Soviet Union by bringing China closer to the American sphere of influence.  With the benefit of hindsight, some might even claim Nixon’s visit was the first step in bringing about the collapse of the Soviet empire.  I wonder if a bold strategic move like Nixon’s visit could happen today, or whether lobbyists’ calls for embargoes or suspending discussions would carry the day.

What also seemed strange to me at the time was the bizarre lead-up to Nixon's week-long visit.  In the 1960s and early 1970s, the only official contact between China and the US was through their embassies in Warsaw, the capital of Poland.  We now know that the first US approach towards China was made, in secret, in late 1969, during a chance meeting of American and Chinese embassy staff at a fashion show in the Polish capital.  Nothing happened until April 1971 when the Chinese government made world headlines by inviting, of all things, an American table-tennis team to visit China.  It became known as ‘ping pong diplomacy’.  And then, finally, Nixon touched down in Beijing

on 21st February, 1972, 40 years ago this Tuesday, and shook hands with the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in what was called at the time ‘the hand shake that changed the world’.

During his week-long visit, the main topic of conversation was China’s wish that the US close its embassy in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, as a condition for the US and China to open embassies in each other’s countries.  American and Chinese preconceptions and stereotypes of each other had to be overcome after so many years of diplomatic silence, and thus much of the President’s and his wife’s time was spent just breaking down these decades of misunderstanding by talking, and joking, and coming to realize that at the end of the day they were common members of humanity who shared the same aspirations – peace and prosperity for their children and for future generations.

The following year, in 1973, the US and China opened not embassies, but liaison offices in each others’ capitals.  Then, in 1975 President Gerald Ford visited China, and four years after that, the two nations established full diplomatic links.

How important was Nixon’s visit to China?  One writer, James Mann, who has written a major history of the Chinese-American relationship, said this: “On a scale of 1 to 10, it was a 10.  As well as changing relations between the US and China, on a global level it changed the nature of the Cold War”.

When Henry Kissinger went to China in 1971 to prepare the way for Nixon’s visit, Premier Zhou Enlai tried to tell him about the Cultural Revolution. ‘Don’t tell me’, said Kissinger. ‘We have no interest in your internal matters’.  That changed of course after the 1989 incidents near Tian An Men Square, and it is impossible for an American President to say today ‘We don’t care what you do to your own people’. Concern about human rights in China has been a significant part of the American relationship with China for the past several decades.  But one thing did change irreversibly after Nixon’s visit – the US has never gone back to pretending the People’s Republic of China does not exist.  

Of course, my visit to Cuba last week fell well short of Nixon’s grand diplomatic gesture into China 40 years ago.  I was there as a traveller to observe, explore, learn and understand, not to achieve a major diplomatic coup.  But I hope my recollections of the profound impact of Nixon’s visit to China will help you to understand the significance it has had on my own thinking for the past forty years, and why I think it is so necessary that people make whatever effort is necessary to understand others and maintain open communication.  Flowing from that, I hope it also explains why I think international schools like Awty have a centrally important role to play in shaping the future or our increasingly globalized world - what environment could be better for giving young people the opportunity to explore different viewpoints, discuss and analyze issues, build a deep appreciation of other cultures and belief systems, and to do so in an environment that actively promotes trust, tolerance and understanding.

Returning to the slightly more mundane matter of my visit to Cuba last week - if you are interested in seeing just a few of the photos I took during my visit, I have uploaded two galleries with about 80 images each.  A gallery with images of Havana can be seen HERE or by clicking the left image below, and to view a gallery showing some of the wonderful old cars that still faithfully ply the roads in Cuba, click HERE or on the right-hand image below.