Born in Santiago de Cuba at the end of the 19th century, Blez began working as a photojournalist for “El Figaro”, a weekly illustrated magazine in Havana. He traveled to Europe and settled in Milan in the early 20s where he studied at the school of Applied Chemistry and Physics of Photography. These studies inspired his experimentation in technique and effects that came to mark his works which were printed from glass plates. In the 1920s he established himself as an accomplished portrait photographer of the wealthy class in Havana and earned a gold medal in 1923 for his shots in “El Mundo” newspaper.