Mario Perez is in many ways exactly what you’d expect of a successful entrepreneur: he’s friendly, funny, intelligent and to-the-point. Like most, he worked hard to get where he is. But upon closer inspection, the path Mario Perez has travelled is far from ordinary: from teaching at the University of Havana to living at the Salvation Army, the founder of Telax is a man of many stories.
Mario Perez was born and raised in Santiago de Cuba, a city of half a million in the south-eastern part of Cuba. When asked how his interest in programming was sparked, he points out that his mother was a math teacher and that that probably had a lot to do with it. Armed with a solid math background and an interest in technology, Mario entered the electronics program at the University of Oriente when he was eighteen.
Reminiscing, he recounts how a teacher at U of O took him under his wing and challenged him with an impossible project: the translation of a huge piece of code from the obscure programming language Leal to the more mainstream Fortran. He never did complete the project, but his work on it advanced him beyond the level of his fellow students and in his second year, he began teaching first-year classes.
He went on to teach at the University of Havana after graduation. When I asked Mario what entrenched his love for computer science, his answer is unequivocal: teaching. “When you teach, you must learn,” he explained. “You have to stay ahead of the curve. I think that my experience in teaching is what has enabled to me to look beyond what’s already been done and see possibility.”
In addition to teaching, Mario worked for a UNESCO-funded organization after his graduation. “We had access to some of the best technology available. That’s the main reason I worked there, for the toys. It was Cuba in the mid-80s we were doing things like 3D modelling.” As it turned out, it was the 3D modelling project for a Cuban industrial design firm that eventually landed him in Canada, where he was sent to purchase JVC equipment. He didn’t board his return flight to Cuba. “It was complicated. There were a lot of politics,” Mario explains quietly.
To be continued…