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Josef: Havana Harbor – 1939, 21 days
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Refugee, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma and Coming of Age
Injustice and Cruelty vs. Empathy and Social Responsibility
Hope vs. Despair
Family, Displacement, and Culture
Invisibility and the Refugee Experience
Summary
Analysis
Isabel and Señora Castillo have been crying since Iván died of his shark bite hours earlier. Isabel doesn’t know how to grasp it. He is just “like every other Cuban who had ever died trying to get to el norte by sea.” But to her, Iván isn’t some nameless person—he was her friend. Isabel aches with sorrow.
In Isabel’s recognition that Iván is like so many other refugees who have died, there are parallels with some of Mahmoud’s thoughts on being invisible. So many of the refugees that came before were invisible to Isabel, but just like Iván, they had full lives with families and dreams, and each one of their deaths is a tragedy that deserves to be prevented.
Themes
Lito says that they should do something with Iván’s body, and moves to set him in the water. Señora Castillo asks to say a prayer first. Isabel has never been to church—Castro and the communists discouraged the practice of religion—but Lito leads a prayer for Iván. They then set him into the water, and Isabel retrieves the baseball cap that Iván always wore and keeps it with her. Then, on the dark horizon, they see lights peek through—Miami.
Just as Josef experiences the loss of his father at this point in the book, Isabel experiences a similar coming of age in recognizing the injustice of the circumstances that she and Iván have faced. Iván’s death is both tragic and ironic because he was so close to Miami, but was still unable to make it there due to the dangers of the journey.
Themes
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