From Singapore to Cuba

The tickets are bought and paid for. In late March, barring the unforeseen, I’ll be off to Cuba. Usually I don’t swot up enough on the places I go to. This time, I’m trying harder. I’ve read a general history of Cuba. I’m reading the background sections of a guidebook (the Insight guide seems pretty good). Some interesting economic insights came from research I had to do some years ago when involved editorially with a book on a US bank, which had a history in pre-Castro Cuba connected with the sugar industry.

Over the last day or two I’ve got hooked on old travelogues, promotional films for tourists made in the 1950s and earlier. And I’ve been comparing the ones on Cuba with those about another island, the place where I happen to live – Singapore.

The fantasies they conjure up are not the same, and yet …


Both places are islands, Singapore very close to the equator, Cuba a bit further north. Cuba, a lot bigger, is ‘a tropical island with a short but eventful history, where the past is ever-present.’ The beaches offer 'luxury and laziness'. Singapore is a ‘teeming, varied island’. ‘Where else in the whole wide world’, the commentator asks, ‘can be found such variety, such contrast?’

The films tend to make only brief and tactful reference to colonial history. Cuba has been touched by ‘Spanish, English and US influence’ (understatement?). Columbus, pirates and the Spanish American War get an occasional look in. Singapore has Stamford Raffles as its founder, a scholar of Malay civilisation with very advanced ideas on the cultural interchange between east and west. (Well, up to a point … ) Colonialism in Singapore is represented by its reassuring ‘Britishness’. Surprisingly for the 1950s, a time of political ferment, in neither case is there much, or any, reference to the forces of anti colonialism.

The Capitol and Hotel Inglaterra, Havana. The Capitol was built in 1929.

Such films always seem to start with ‘arrival’: ships are shown steaming into Cuba against the backdrop of the Morro fortress. In Singapore, less impressively, one film shows a BOAC Super Constellation arriving at the old Paya Lebar airport, where the immigration official says heartily, ‘Have a good time! Can’t fail in Singapore.’ In earlier times, many tourists would have arrived at Clifford Pier, with the Bund-like buildings of Collyer Quay as the backdrop.

The former Supreme Court, Singapore, completed in 1939.

All the films stress the attractions of the hotels. In Singapore, they are ‘luxurious, romantic and comfortable’. No danger of cockroaches or lizards, it seems. Here, the iconic hotel is Raffles. In Cuba, it is the Hotel Nacional, much bigger, more Americanised.

For the visitor, both places are heady cocktails of old and new.

Cuba is ‘one of the most modern and colourful cities in the world’, with clean streets ‘lined with fine shops’, impressive monuments and civic buildings. At the same time it has a double face. ‘The modern world is superimposed on an ancient Spanish city’, characterized by siesta, horses and carts among the gas-guzzling Detroit iron, exotic fruits and vegetables, all presented to the accompaniment of exciting, rhythmic, Latin music. As we are told, ‘the past is ever-present.’ The films show a reassuring blend of sunshine, modernity, and just enough exotically foreign-looking people and Spanish colonial architecture to make you feel your trip was worthwhile. 

You don’t learn much about the everyday lives of actual Cubans, except that in some areas the workers on the sugar plantations ‘stlll use the old harvest methods, as they have for the past few centuries’. No mention of poverty or exploitation. 

The possibilities of Cuba are exciting, without being quite spelled out: ‘At night, the city takes on a new complexion.’ (Visitors are kept oblivious to the fact that the casinos, drug, abortion and prostitution rackets were run mostly by American criminal interests.) And, from time to time, ‘Cubans young and old’ enjoy a ‘fun-filled carnival’.

As for Singapore: ‘Perhaps it’s at night that this polyglot city comes most alive. When the lights come up, there every kind of entertainment to tempt you out, and every kind of eating – and dancing!’ The rather decorous ballroom/nightclub-style dancing shown in one film looks very tame compared to what was probably on offer in Cuba, although in those days, even Singapore had its possibilities if you knew where to go. Indeed, as we are told, it is ‘a city that never sleeps’.

Raffles Hotel, Singapore, around 1960

Like Cuba, Singapore also has a double face, or even multiple faces. ‘All the crush and tumble of the East are [sic] found side by side with luxurious living.’ Much is made of the cultural and ethnic diversity. ‘Where else in the whole wide world can be found such variety, such contrast? … A fair city of towers and spires, of minarets and domes, of ancient symbols and sacred creatures. Here is the world in miniature, a city proud to find room for so much, taking its character from the peoples it shelters.’ Then, as now, the streets were reassuringly clean.

For Singapore, announces one commentator, is ‘the crossroads of the world’. In other films it’s the crossroads of the East. Or the Gibraltar of the East. Whatever. At any rate, here ‘two oceans meet and the flags of every nation flutter’.

Around 1960, the waterfront at Collyer Quay, Singapore, which traditionally greeted visitors arriving by sea; now only the Asia Insurance Building (on the left) remains, surrounded and dwarfed by modern office high-rises

For American tourists in the fifties, Cuba offered a dash of tropical glamour less than a hundred miles from the American coast. You had to travel a lot further to get to Singapore. But it’s interesting to see how both were presented to visitors as exotic, romantic, and yet reassuringly familiar and safe. Strictly no politics.

After 50 years of the Castro regime, it’ll be interesting to see what charms Cuba has to offer. The cars are the main thing.