In Cuba I studied Dramaturgy at the University of the Arts. But my education did not happen only inside a classroom.
I wrote, taught, worked with students, practised cultural journalism and criticism, took part in creative projects and spent years trying to understand why a story works: what a person wants, what stops them, what changes a situation and what makes someone want to keep watching.
I wanted to build something of my own.
I imagined and designed different projects with the intention of starting something of my own. Some went further than others. But circumstances, the limitations of the context and life itself gradually pushed that idea further away.
I came to complete a postgraduate programme in Marketing and Digital Communication at ESIC Valencia.
And when you start again in another country, you do not always begin by working in the field you trained for. You work where you can, learn, adapt and keep moving. Hospitality was part of that journey. Then came different business environments, customer service, sales, commercial consulting and marketing.
I worked for others until I understood what I wanted to build for myself.
While studying Marketing and Digital Communication and applying what I learned in Spanish companies, I began to understand more clearly how a value proposition is built, how a brand is positioned, how audiences are studied, how content is designed for different objectives and how a brand tries to find a distinctive place among many others.
Commercial work added another layer: it allowed me to observe those strategies when they reached direct contact with people. How they ask, hesitate, compare, postpone, trust and finally decide.
But an idea I had left behind also returned. I was working, producing, learning and contributing my knowledge to other people’s projects; increasingly, I felt that all that experience could also become something I built from the ground up.
So I began experimenting on my own work: with my content, my social channels, writing, video, digital tools and artificial intelligence. I tested an idea, watched what happened, changed a structure, edited again and started over.
Another marketing technique was not always what was missing.
That is where I recognised something that had been with me for years. Sometimes structure was missing. Tension was missing. Rhythm was missing. Understanding the desire of the person on the other side was missing. What was missing was knowing what to reveal, when to reveal it and what needed to happen next.
It taught me to work with actions, desires, conflicts, rhythm, time, transformation and meaning.
It taught me to connect a proposition with a market, an audience, a need and a distinctive position.
They allowed me to observe what happens when that proposition enters a real conversation.
It taught me that knowing something is not enough if we do not know how to use it.
They taught me to research, interpret and find a precise way to tell.
It gave me new tools to turn everything above into execution.
Leonardo Estrada Studio.
Not as a break with what I had done before, but as the place where everything that came before could finally meet.
Today I use that combination to work on one question that runs through almost everything we do at the Studio:
What is preventing the value that already exists from being understood, felt and chosen?
Sometimes the answer is in a story. Other times it is in the structure of a website, a sales conversation, a campaign, a video or training that transmits knowledge but still fails to turn it into applied learning.
My work begins by finding that point.
And building what is missing.