Mario Ernesto Sanchez likes to tell a story about a mule in his hometown of San Antonio de Las Vegas: "This mule picked up the trash in my village every day. She wore blinders and kept focused on her job, ignoring how we would torment her with sticks and rocks as she made her rounds, because she knew that when she was finished, she would be set free again in the field, where nobody could touch her."

Mario smiles, his fondness for that old mule crinkling the corners of his eyes. "She is my inspiration," he says. "As long as you strive towards a goal, what happens around you in life is not that important."

Right now, this Key Biscayne resident is in the center of a whirlwind of activity as the 12th annual International Hispanic Theater Festival races towards its May 16 opening. He is the founder and producing artistic director of both a Coral Gables-based Hispanic theater called Teatro Avante and the festival, which this year is represented by theater, dance and music troupes from eight countries.

He's had to organize everything from performances to educational seminars, from sponsorship to marketing, from opening night to awards ceremony, from festival poster to parking.

"Coral Gables was supposed to give me $1,000 worth of free parking as part of our agreement," he moans, "and now, suddenly they are saying that it can't be done. But I will straighten it out because we can't have people coming here to perform from as far away as South American and Europe and not have somewhere convenient for them to park."

Like all of us, Mario Ernesto Sanchez plays many roles in life. Unlike most of us, this actor, director, producer, playwright and administrator has been able to play some of these roles on stage, screen and television.

"I first performed in school plays as a child in Cuba," he says. "I found it fascinating to try to be someone else and having people believe it."

Before he'd grown up, Mario was one of 14,000 Cuban kids who played the role of Pedro Pan during the operation that brought them to the U.S. without their parents. They were dispersed to Catholic schools throughout the U.S., and Mario ended up in Helena, Montana, of all places.

"Talk about culture shock," he says with a laugh. "I came from a tropical country to a place where the next morning I saw kids sliding on the sidewalk and thought that it was magic. Little did I realize that they were ice skating, but immediately, I wanted to slide like them."

Mario adapted, learning to eat, if not really enjoy, the bland American food and drink white milk. ("Who'd ever heard of that?" he asks. "At home, we drank our milk with coffee, cafe con leche.") And he learned English by translating an American history book word-for-word.

After a year and a half, Mario's parents came over and settled in San Antonio, Texas, where his sister had been sent.

"The monsignor called me in and offered me a college scholarship if I would stay in Montana," he reminsces. "I asked when the first flight to Texas was and left the next day at 7 a.m."

In San Antonio, the family was reunited, but it was a hard life where they all had to work. His first job was as a dishwasher at Howard Johnson's, where he said he learned to hate ice cream. Then it was a work-study job at a psychiatric hospital as a nurse technician.

"It was pathetic the way they treated the people inside," he says, shaking his head at the memory. "One night, one of the patients died, and when I went to report it to the head of the department, I was punished for leaving the ward. I was made to take the dead man to the morgue, take his clothes off and finally, take his false teeth out and put them into an envelope. Believe me when I say that I had some nightmares about that one."

Mario escaped the mental hospital by failing English at school and thus flunking out of the work-study program. After that, he went to work as an errand boy at a furniture store. Here, the whims of fate struck again as the bookeeper was stricken by a stroke, and Mario was asked if he could fill in. Never one to let a lack of training slow him down, he said "sure" and immediatley switched his major at school so he could study accounting at night and apply what he'd learned during the day.

But San Antonio was still pretty much of a hick town where the movies that premiered in New York didn't appear locally for several months. As a 21-year-old who'd already seen enough of the world to know that this wasn't exactly his idea of paradise, he made a decision which he remembers like this:

"One day, I rented a U-Haul, walked into my house and announced to my family, 'Ladies and gentlemen, tomorrow I'm moving to Miami. Anyone who wants to come along is welcome.'"

His mother and sister came along, and Mario eventually landed a job as an administrator for the Miami Mental Health Center In the meantime, Mario studied theater at Florida International University and graduated with honors in 1978. The following year, he founded Teatro Avante to promote and preserve Hispanic cultural heritage. In the 17 years of its existance, Teatro Avante has performed in seven countries on four continents while employing more than 800 artists.

In 1986, Mario combined his Teatro Avante with other local Latin theater groups to create the festival.

"When we got a grant from the Ford Foundation, we went national, and when we got a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, we went international," he says proudly. "It's the only international Hispanic theater festival in the country."

In 1990, when his job at the mental health center was eliminated, he decided to devote his energies to his baby theater full-time.

"At that point I said, 'If I'm going to make a living in the arts, this is the time to do it. If I fail, I can always get another job,'" he says, chuckling once again. "I haven't had to get one yet."

One reason he's been so successful at dodging other forms of gainful employment is that he is equally adept in the business end of the theater world as he is in the creative end.

"As producer and artistic director, it's a perfect combination because there is no bickering between the artistic and administrative ends," he explains. "I am both."

Likewise, his goals are twofold. The first is to create good art.

"Theater should entertain you, but also make you think," he says. "I am a perfectionist and because of that, can sometimes be difficult to work with. Perfection doesn't exist, but if you try for it, you escape mediocrity."

His second goal is to promote Teatro Avante and the festival beyond the Hispanic community, a seemingly Quixotic quest in South Florida.

"I'm trying to make the plays more accessible to non-Spanish speakers," he says. "One way is to try one with subtitles. This is the only place where language is so sensitive. I think that is because Anglo theater is based on text; Hispanic and European theater is more symbolic."

Mario's dedication to theater has come a a rather substantial cost. His wife, Alina, divorced him because she said that he loved the theater more than her. Three children are involved, Gaston, 19, Greta, 17, and Veronica, 13. But the ever-philosophical Sanchez insists that things really have worked out for the best.

"If both parents are civil and smart and concerned with the welfare of the kids, they end up with two homes instead of a broken home," he explains. "That, I believe is the basic principle of having a successful divorce."

Though he doesn't have an over-abundance of leisure time to enjoy the island paradise of Key Biscayne, he does dream about it quite often:

"There's nothing I'd rather do than go over that bridge to Key Biscayne, put on a swimsuit and sit on the beach with a drink in my hand and pretend that I have nothing better to do than lay in the sun like a roasting pig and get tan."

For better or worse, there's precious little time for such sloth.

"It never ceases to amaze me how, after the trials and tribulations and arguments and fights, you think that you're never going to do this again," he says with a sigh. "Then the show opens and all of a sudden, you start thinking about what you're going to do next."