The plays, the companies and the experience change from year to year. But Mario Ernesto Sánchez knows that pulling together Miami's International Hispanic Theatre Festival -- the 24th edition begins Wednesday -- involves certain constant challenges.

Artist visas. Funding, both in dollars and donated services. Transportation, housing and meals for the visiting companies. Enriching the experience with an educational component. Even the parties that help make a festival, well, festive.

''Every year, it's difficult,'' says Sánchez, who has a convincing que será será attitude about his annual tribulations. ``This year it's even more so because of the economic situation. . . . Every time I come to the office, there's a new crisis.''

This year's budget is about $300,000 in funds and in-kind donations, down from a more typical $500,000, and the number of companies performing is 9 vs. the 11 that took part last year. But otherwise -- in Spanish, Spanish with English supertitles, English and wordless family entertainment -- the shows go on.

That's vital to Sánchez, a 62-year-old actor-director who came to the United States from Cuba on a Pedro Pan flight at 15.

'I say, `Why am I doing this?' It's because we have to get to the 25th year,'' he says. ``There are always new crises, new hopes.''

This year's festival is billed as a tribute to the theater of Colombia, just as last year's was a tribute to Spanish theater.

Bogota's Los Ojos del Hermano Eterno opens the festival with a production of Manuel Orjuela Cortés' Carta de una desconocida (Letter from a Stranger), about a woman who tells a stranger about her passion for the man who was the love of her life. Santiago García, founder of Bogota's La Candelaria theater company, will receive the festival's Life Achievement in the Performing Arts Award following the opening night performance in the Carnival Studio Theater at Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.

Otherwise, Colombian theater will be most in the spotlight during the festival's educational program, presented in conjunction with the Miami Dade College-based Florida Center for the Literary Arts from 2 to 5 p.m. Friday, and 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday .

Three of this year's presenting groups are from Mexico, the country Sánchez intends to honor during the 25th festival, and three from the United States: the Los Angeles-based Company of Angels Theatre, which will perform Oliver Mayer's Dias y flores (Days and Flowers, the only festival play done in English); Miami's Prometeo Theatre, performing Otelo (Raquel Carrió's adaptation of William Shakespeare's Othello); and Miami's Teatro Avante doing yet another Carrió adaptation, this one of Virgilio Piñera's Aire frío (Cold Air).

Avante founder Sánchez is directing the Piñera play, his nod to the fact that the company is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Prometeo director Joann Maria Yarrow says of Sánchez's milestones, ``Success is measured by the fact that you can continue doing what you love. The festival is successful.''

Prometeo is celebrating its own small milestone this year as the first class in its Spanish-language professional theater conservatory finishes its two-year program by performing Otelo at the festival.

''We're the only school participating,'' says Yarrow, who points out that Prometeo's is the only program of its kind in the country. ``It confers a sense of respect and authority to be part of this. . . . Slowly and surely, all kinds of Hispanic art are becoming part of America's panorama of culture.''

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