Some careers are built around a carefully mapped plan. Others are shaped by a series of decisions made when the plan no longer works.
This article inaugurates a new blog series derived from our video project “La Silla del Ingeniero”, centered on real conversations with engineers across disciplines, backgrounds, and generations. The goal is to go beyond titles and résumés to explore the experiences that shape them: migration, starting over, reinvention, problem-solving, setbacks, and the pursuit of success. In each conversation, the focus is on the human side of engineering—the tenacity, lessons, and decisions behind the professional path.
The story of Fernando Torres CEO and co-founder of Eastern Engineering Group, belongs to the second category.
Long before Eastern Engineering Group became part of his professional life, Torres was already developing the instincts that would later become essential to entrepreneurship: questioning circumstances that no longer made sense, looking for alternatives instead of waiting for conditions to improve, moving quickly when uncertainty appeared, and learning to separate professional identity from the willingness to do whatever the next stage required.
His journey from Havana to Miami is part of that story, but it is not the whole story. What matters most is what those years reveal about the way he thinks.
For him, resilience has rarely meant simply enduring difficult circumstances. It has meant responding to them.
Hit play to hear the story in their own words and discover the experiences that shaped their mindset.
The First Decision: When the Equation No Longer Made Sense
His story begins with a calculation.
In Cuba, he was already working as an engineer, but the rapid devaluation of the local currency had changed the relationship between professional effort and economic reality. He describes realizing that the salary he earned after investing his time and training was barely sufficient for basic necessities.
His reaction is revealing because it was not simply frustration. It was reassessment.
“If things keep going this way, I’m going to look for other alternatives.”
— mentions Fernando Torres, CEO and founder of Eastern Engineering Group
That sentence contains one of the clearest clues to his entrepreneurial mindset.
When a system stopped producing a reasonable outcome, his instinct was not to remain inside it indefinitely. He began looking for another route. Photography became one of those alternatives. He would walk home, knock on doors, photograph children, and later develop the pictures with Raissa Lopez (President of Eastern Engineering Group), who would later become his wife, in a small room at the back of their home.
It was modest entrepreneurship, but the scale is less important than the mechanism.
Observe the situation. Decide whether it still works. If it does not, create another option.
Years before building a company, he was already practicing one of the most important disciplines of business leadership: refusing to confuse persistence with passivity.
Eventually, that feeling expanded beyond economics. “I no longer fit on the island, in Havana, in Cuba. It felt too small for me.”
Miami: Urgency Without Waiting for Certainty
Torres arrived in Miami in 1993 with a tourist visa, a high fever and $100 that had been given to him before the trip. His original plan was not to build a life in the United States. He intended to earn money and eventually continue to Spain with his family.
The arrival was disorienting. He had no one waiting for him at the airport and only one family connection to contact.
Yet what stands out in his recollection is how quickly uncertainty became action.
After arriving at the home of Hortensia, a family connection through his wife Raissa, he asked for only a few days to get established. He had already imposed a deadline on himself:
“I need to be renting my own place within three months and have a job today.”
— Fernando Torres
Within hours of landing, he was walking through Miami looking for employment. He eventually found it at La Rosa restaurant, washing dishes. The next day, he went to work.
It is tempting to read this simply as an immigrant story about hardship. But there is a more useful business lesson underneath it. He was creating momentum before he had certainty.
He could not immediately control where his career would lead, but he could control whether the first step happened today or tomorrow. That distinction would become increasingly important as his professional life developed.
A Mental Model Built Around Movement
Entrepreneurs are often described as people who take risks. His story suggests something more precise: successful decision-makers learn how to move while information is still incomplete.
The restaurant was not the destination. Neither was the bicycle he used to move between jobs. Nor was the first construction opportunity that followed.
A person who identifies too strongly with a title can reject opportunities that appear beneath that title. Although he had been trained as an engineer, arriving in a new environment meant that his credentials, experience and expectations did not automatically translate into immediate professional standing.
He did not wait for reality to recognize who he believed he was. He entered reality where the opening existed.
Through connections made after arriving in Miami, a friend eventually introduced him to an opportunity connected with businessman Felipe Valls. Torres joined a construction crew responsible for maintenance work associated with Valls’ businesses.
He finally had a job closer to construction. But there was another lesson waiting for him there.
Ego Must Be Cheaper Than Opportunity
He remembers arriving at the construction crew knowing that the people there had already heard he was an engineer.
His expectation was understandable. Perhaps his technical background would immediately give him a different role.
Instead, a supervisor handed him a heavy sledgehammer and marked a rectangular opening that needed to be demolished. That moment recalibrated his expectations.
“That’s when I realized that there was a long road ahead before you could reach the dreams you have.”
— admits the founder, looking back at a moment that changed his perspective on success
The lesson is larger than the job itself. Professional growth often requires accepting that what you know and what you have already achieved may not automatically carry the same value in a different environment. New markets, new industries and new stages of a company can demand that a leader become a beginner again.
For an entrepreneur, that requires humility. Not passive humility. Operational humility.
The kind that allows someone to say: I know where I want to go, but I am willing to learn what this particular road requires.
That distinction is fundamental when a business begins to scale. The methods that solve yesterday’s problem do not necessarily solve tomorrow’s. Leaders who become attached to the authority of previous success can easily stop learning.
His early experience suggests the opposite instinct: understand the environment first, then figure out how to advance inside it.
Learning What Cannot Be Seen From the Outside
One of the most interesting sections of the interview comes from his time working alongside a man he calls Marquitos.
Torres wanted to learn. Marquitos was not particularly interested in letting the young engineer turn every task into a technical exercise. He repeatedly told him not to take measurements and simply to follow instructions. Instead of disengaging, he began observing.
“I really began to find my footing in the unknown.”There is an important leadership principle hidden in that phrase.
The visible part of an organization is rarely the whole organization. An engineer can study drawings without understanding everything that happens in the field. A business owner can study reports without understanding everything employees experience. A manager can study productivity without understanding the human reasons behind it.
His early education in Miami increasingly came from proximity: working alongside people, listening to them and recognizing how much remained outside his own frame of reference.
The willingness to discover what you do not know is one of the most valuable forms of intelligence a leader can develop.
Resilience Is Also Relational
His story would also be incomplete if it were presented as the mythology of a completely self-made entrepreneur.
Hortensia opened a door. Andrés gave him a bicycle that he would use for more than a year. Armando helped create another connection. Felipe Valls provided an opportunity. Others shared knowledge, transportation, work or simply an act of generosity at precisely the moment it mattered.
What makes his account interesting is that he remembers those gestures decades later. He even recalls approaching Felipe Valls shortly before Valls’ death to thank him personally for having provided one of his first opportunities in the United States.
That memory offers another clue to the leadership model that emerges from the interview. Resilience is individual, but progress rarely is.
People create opportunities for other people. The responsibility of the person receiving that opportunity is to recognize it, use it and, eventually, understand its value.
For a company leader, that principle becomes particularly significant. Organizations grow through systems, capital, clients and technical expertise, but they also grow because people decide to open doors for one another.
The Operating System Behind the Entrepreneur
This episode of La Silla del Ingeniero does not yet tell every chapter of Eastern Engineering Group’s expansion. In some ways, that makes the conversation more revealing. Instead of beginning with the company after it existed, we get to examine the mental operating system that preceded it.
Several patterns repeat throughout his story. When the economics of his engineering job stopped making sense, he searched for an alternative. When he arrived in Miami without certainty, he created an immediate objective.
When the first available work did not match his professional identity, he worked anyway. When entering construction exposed gaps between his expectations and reality, he recalibrated.
When people around him possessed knowledge he did not have, he listened. When others helped him, he remembered.
Those are not isolated anecdotes. Together, they form a recognizable framework for entrepreneurship.
Adapt faster than circumstances change. Protect momentum. Do not allow ego to become an obstacle to learning. Pay attention to the people closest to the actual work. Understand that relationships create possibilities that individual competence alone cannot manufacture.
Applied at company scale, those principles become leadership. They influence how a founder approaches uncertainty, how quickly a team responds when conditions change, how an organization learns and how leaders interpret setbacks that might otherwise look like failures.
The Leadership Value of Difficult Stages
Near the end of this portion of the conversation, Torres offers perhaps the most important reflection of the entire interview.
After describing the different jobs, people, adjustments and realizations that marked his beginning in Miami, he looks backward at those experiences with a different perspective:
“If you don’t go through those stages, you don’t truly give things the value they deserve.”
— Fernando Torres
The value of difficult experiences comes from what they teach people to recognize, appreciate, and build afterward.
That observation is different from romanticizing hardship.
Difficulty is not automatically valuable. What creates value is what a person learns to recognize because of it. A leader who has experienced instability may understand stability differently. Someone who has needed an opportunity may recognize the significance of giving one. Someone who has started again from the bottom may understand that job titles never tell the entire story of the person occupying them.
And someone who has repeatedly discovered how much he does not know may remain more willing to learn. That may be one of the most important connections between his early experiences and the leader he later became.
The story is not simply that he endured difficult circumstances before building a business. It is that those circumstances trained the way he would eventually think about building one.
The Journey Continues
At Eastern Engineering Group, we will continue sharing the personal stories, challenges overcome, and professional journeys of the engineers who make up our team. Through “La Silla del Ingeniero”, we will keep exploring the experiences, decisions, and lessons that shape not only professional careers, but also the culture and values behind our firm. We invite you to follow the upcoming installments of this series and discover new conversations with the engineers who bring Eastern Engineering Group to life through our blog.
© 2026 Eastern Engineering Group wrote and published this article. All rights reserved.
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