Cafe Mundo is an open forum for our visitors to publish research papers, essays, travel stories, and photos. We translate much of what is on the site into both Spanish and English, and hope to encourage a cross-cultural dialog about life in the U.S. and Latin America: about poverty, deforestation, history, development, and living abroad.

 

We welcome contributions from visitors living  in Latin America, who can share the experience of working and living in that half of the Western Hemisphere than North Americans know very little about.

 

Historically, coffee houses have been places where people met and exchanged greetings and information. They were places for dissent, financial collaboration and cultural exchange in communities from Europe to America. Lloyd's Coffee House of London was a famous meeting place for ship captains, and published tide tables and news from overseas as "Lloyd's List." Hence the Cafe Mundo name, which suggests a virtual coffee house.

 

At this coffeehouse we want to provide a forum to discuss subjects both entertaining and serious told through essays, photos, and interviews. It is our deliberate effort to create a dialog outside of the classroom and the media. Much of what we get from the media, and in the classroom, is sensationalist or politically motivated. Twenty years after the collapse of communism in Russia, academics and activists are still pushing ideologies derived from theories of exploitation, rather than from an understanding of the real world. Their adversaries push ideologies based on excessive faith in “free markets” or religion.

 

The result is that the crisis of events derives from a crisis of ideas. Ideas are important. They are the building blocks upon which we build our systems of government and public policies. They are the foundations of our cultures. Our contribution is to promote a discussion of ideas grounded in reality and experience – without regard to ideology.

 

Some of these ideas are:

 

 

On a lighter note, we present travel stories and photos provided by people living and traveling abroad. We hope you find them intresting and entertaining.

 

Why Bother? We want this website to be a forum where writers and travelers can share their experiences, essays and research while sipping a cup of java at their keyboards, thousands of miles apart.