Cuban–Puerto Rican Relations and Final Projections

This concluding chapter traces the portrayal of Puerto Ricans and Puerto Rican–Cuban relations. It studies Miguel Barnet's La vida real (1986) to reflect on the negative treatment of Puerto Ricans in Cuban American and other Latino writing. In spite of the many positive qualities of La vida real, its negative portrayal of Puerto Ricans in no way contradicts the Cuban American model, even as Barnet's text purports to be sympathetic to Puerto Rican problems and the falsification of their reality. This is a negativity that prevents a truer, deeper portrayal of U.S. Puerto Rican cultural realities such as may be found in the work of Juan Flores, Edna Acosta-Belén, Frances Aparicio, Arlene Dávila, and Agustín Laó-Montes—indeed, two successive generations of U.S. Puerto Rican specialists.