It looked like an ordinary scrap of paper, one of those pieces the wind drags across the sand that almost no one stops to pick up. Yet it was a four-page love letter dated April 16, 1972. It was found by Delight Rogers during a walk on a beach in Cuba last February while she was searching for seashells.
The love letter found on the beach in Cuba
The letter was written entirely in Spanish. Rogers couldn’t immediately grasp its content, but the date alone made it unusual. It had been 54 years since someone had picked up a pencil and filled those pages. At first the artist had imagined she was looking at a message in a bottle, one of those stories that seem to belong more to novels than to real life. Then, back home, she set the sheet aside.
The letter begins with “querida novia” (dear girlfriend) and Pablo writes it, recounting that he is aboard a ship. The author says he has received letters from his companion and is glad to know she is well. He asks after his mother. Then he returns to the moment of departure, the one that evidently had left a wound open. He explains that he didn’t go to the door to bid her farewell one last time because he feared he would not be able to leave. It is a sentence that, more than half a century later, still carries all its fragility. Not the heroic gesture of a grand goodbye, but the very human fear of looking once more at the person you love and losing the courage to leave them. Pablo speaks of a lump in his throat, of a pain hard to contain. He prefers to seem distant for a moment rather than give in to her.
The rest of the letter maintains the same intimate tone. He tells her that his heart is entirely hers, that she must have no doubts. He speaks of their marriage, of the future he imagines with her, of the day they will become husband and wife. He promises that as soon as the ship reaches the harbor, he will let her know he is safe with a telegram. He salutes his family, sends affection to his brothers, asks for more news from home. Then he closes with a single word: “Tuyo.” Yours. And beneath it, his name. Pablo.
How did the letter survive for 54 years?
The discovery of the letter in Cuba remains hard to explain. The paper isn’t perfect: the corners are worn, there are stains and tiny tears. Yet the handwriting is still legible, the folds hold, the pages haven’t been ruined by time. For this reason the bottle-message hypothesis, as fascinating as it is, seems unconvincing.
After all, if the letter had truly stayed at sea for decades it would have suffered more damage. Therefore the possibility points to a story perhaps less romantic: the letter could have been kept for a long time in a drawer and then lost or discarded recently.
There is a detail that makes this possibility even more plausible. The letter wasn’t found near the water, but higher up, on the dry sand, near a few small abandoned shacks. Places that today look empty, but which once might have housed people. Perhaps the sheet had remained there for decades. Perhaps the wind, the rain, or the deterioration of a structure brought it out only recently.
From Pablo remains a promise of love
Of that man and the woman he wrote to we know almost nothing. We don’t know if they ever met again. We don’t know if they married, if the promised telegram ever arrived, if that letter was read by the person for whom it was written, or if it stayed for years sealed in a drawer.
Yet something endures. A voice. A feeling entrusted to a pencil. The fear of leaving, the desire to return, the need to reassure someone you love: all contained in a letter found on a Cuban beach entirely by chance.
54 years have passed since those words, which today have become a fragment of history that moves us: a letter that survives time and is found by accident on a beach to remind us how love can endure centuries and adversities while staying pure.
