The world of journalism in Sancti Spíritus bid farewell this week to Pedro Larralde Machado, a veteran figure in Cuban press who dedicated more than five decades to the profession and was regarded by his colleagues as a master of the guild.
The news of her death spread on Wednesday when journalist Delia Rosa Proenza Barzaga shared it on social media, and the newspaper Escambray published in her honor an interview that had been conducted with her in early 2021.
Proenza defined him as "an essential piece in the history of Escambray and of journalism in Sancti Spíritus." A native of Santa Clara, Larralde worked in print media, radio, and television in Sancti Spíritus, and in 2020 he received the Provincial Prize Tomás Álvarez de los Ríos for lifetime achievement, the highest recognition in the journalism profession in that province.
His entry into journalism was accidental: as a voluntary correspondent at the Inpud factory in Santa Clara, he began writing notes for the newspaper Vanguardia without imagining that those brief contributions would set the course of his life, he recounted in that interview.
The career of Larralde was marked by episodes of significant intensity. He was a war correspondent in Angola for 12 months during the latter half of the 1970s, reporting for the magazine Verde Olivo, and covered the XXI World Festival of Youth and Students in Havana in 1978.
In 1981, he joined the newspaper Escambray, where he worked as a reporter and head of Information for several years. Journalist Juan Antonio Borrego always spoke with admiration about Larralde's "clinical eye" for both content and the visual aspect of the pages, noted Proenza Barzaga in the mentioned interview. Regarding that period, Larralde himself commented at the time: "Escambray taught me a lot; one of the best things I found there was the understanding and camaraderie of my colleagues." He later moved to radio and then to the television center Centrovisión, where he worked as a reporter and scriptwriter for the news until his later years.
Larralde did not shy away from criticizing the official journalism of the island. In the interview reproduced by Escambray, he stated: “I always insist that, with honorable exceptions, we are doing very monotonous journalism, lacking in appeal and critical thought; we need to move more towards what the reader needs to know and elevate ourselves to the level of Cuban life.”
This stance is particularly significant in the current context: since March 2026, Escambray ceased printing and transitioned to digital format due to the paper and resource shortages affecting all provincial press in Cuba.
The news sparked a widespread wave of condolences among colleagues and former coworkers, who remembered him fondly as "Larra". A former coworker from the Centrovisión news program wrote that Larralde "would never have wanted to retire" and that "he was one of those people who didn't like to go home until the news program was ready." Another colleague who looked up to him confessed, "I've lost Rafa and Larra, the two reasons that inspired my love for journalism for a decade... and perhaps I never said 'thank you' enough."
The material crisis facing the Cuban press in 2026 —with national newspapers reduced to a weekly edition and provincial media lacking paper—, alongside the deeper crisis of its overwhelming propaganda role, rather than a journalistic one, makes the voice of those like Larralde, who called for a journalism more in tune with the reality of Cubans during their lifetime, particularly resonant.
"His conduct and ethics will remain in the memory of those of us in the profession who learned to appreciate him," wrote one of his colleagues upon hearing the news.
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