When Mario Ernesto Sánchez thinks about putting together another International Hispanic Theatre Festival -- this year's edition is his 23rd -- he thinks back to the mule that hauled garbage to the town dump in the years before he left Cuba at 15 on a Pedro Pan flight.

''When I was a kid, I was very bad,'' the animated Sánchez, 61, says with a grin over lunch at Little Havana's Las Tapas de Rosa. ``The mule that picked up garbage in my hometown of San Antonio de las Vegas had a huge cart. My friends and I would try to get her excited. We'd throw rocks, use slingshots, anything to try to get her to turn over the cart. But she didn't. She knew that once she'd delivered the garbage to the dump, she'd be free for the rest of the day. She had a mission.''

And when the going inevitably gets rough as Sánchez is dealing with artists and visas and funding each year, the memory of that mule keeps him going.

''The mission,'' he says, ``is the festival.''

The quality and variety of Spanish-language theater in South Florida have grown markedly better in the past few years, thanks to companies like the Hispanic Theatre Guild and Teatro in Miami. Still, Miami remains a festival-crazy place, and Sánchez knows that bringing first-rate productions of works by Hispanic and Latino playwrights here is a no-brainer. Last year, about 80 percent of the seats to each performance in the Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts and the Prometeo Theater space at Miami Dade College's Wolfson Campus were filled.

But making the festival come together is never simple.

AN ANNUAL CRISIS

In financial terms, the XXIII International Hispanic Theatre Festival has only about half the funding of its recent predecessors ($250,000 vs. $500,000) in money and in-kind donations. Sánchez, however, has made it work, as he always does.

''Since the economy has tanked, private corporations and some foundations declined to support us this year,'' he says. ``If not for the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and [director] Michael Spring, I don't know what we would have done. They pushed for us. They're fighters.

``The situation has created a lot of anguish, but I have that every year. In other years, it would have been visas. This year, it was funding and support. I've learned, through all my crises, you have to have that mission and go for it.''

Spring, who worked with Mayor Carlos Alvarez, Miami-Dade's County Commission and the Cultural Affairs Council to maintain the level of county support for the festival this year, says, ``We've been supportive of the festival virtually since its inception. We recognize Mario Ernesto's vision, tenacity and taste. He has an incredible sense of what good theater can be, and he brings it here. . . . While he thinks deeply about the festival, he also thinks globally about the cultural community here. We can always count on his forceful, sensitive, passionate point of view on behalf of the arts community.''

Sánchez's longtime colleague, Lilliam Vega, who is directing Raquel Carrió's adaptation of Fernando de Rojas' La Celestina for this year's festival, concurs: ``Mario is a fighter, a leader but, above all, a true artist who will [take any] risk to defend his dreams.''

His dream and annual mission is to gather the best companies he can afford to bring to Miami for an international celebration of theater by Hispanic playwrights.

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