FACULTY profile CÉSAR PÉREZ | By Jessica Tomer
Exploring Across Disciplines
M
uch like those of the students he now teaches, César Pérez’s varied interests have pulled him in different directions from his earliest days. As a child in Cuba, he imagined himself among the stars, like in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. At seven years old, he was certain he was going to be the first Cuban in space... “I still remember my disappointment when I read in the newspaper that some Cuban pilot was going to participate in a Soviet space flight,” César says. (He grew up immersed in the countries’ Cold War allyship.) Thus, he “gave up what might have been a magnificent career” as an astronaut, he says, quoting Saint-Exupéry tongue-in-cheek. As a teenager, César’s attention shifted earthward, to journalism, which he opted to study as an undergraduate in Cuba, “a place where ‘free press’ is more than an oxymoron,” he says. Still, he entered college “with dreams of becoming a war correspondent or a hard-nosed reporter hellbent on exposing corruption and abuse—you know, like the ones in American movies,” he says. A tour of the “incredibly dull and uninspiring” state-run media dashed those dreams just one week into his college career. “I finished journalism school knowing already I didn’t want to work as a journalist, at least not in Cuba,” he says. So César moved to the Dominican Republic, where he worked “a series of almost hilariously low-paying jobs.” Then he got an offer to teach journalism at a local university. “I immediately got hooked on teaching,” he says. “Since then, I haven’t looked back.” But he did look north. Like many native Cubans, much of César’s family lived in the U.S., including his mother and younger brother, and the plan was always to reunite with them. In 2002 he finally arrived on a student visa to enter a graduate program at the University of Iowa. He then attended the Romance Languages and Literatures graduate program at Harvard. Except for a two-year stint in Connecticut when he taught at the Hotchkiss School, César has lived in Boston ever since. He came to Commonwealth School in 2018, joining both the language and history departments, teaching all levels of Spanish as well as Medieval World History.
28 CM Summer 2020
