Sugar Baron: Manuel Rionda and the Fortunes of Pre-Castro Cuba (review)

Entrepreneurs are one of the least researched social groups in Latin America. The history of business has only begun to develop as a field in Latin American studies over the past generation, and the powerful influences of social history and cultural studies over the past forty years have not encouraged the study of Latin American business elites or entrepreneurs. In the coming years, unexploited, underutilized, and (no doubt) undiscovered business archives will offer the enterprising researcher many opportunities to make important contributions to the history of business in Latin America. These studies should drastically recast our understanding of economic and business development and underdevelopment in the Americas.

One of the richest of these business archives is the Braga Brothers Collection. Spanning some eighty years (from the 1880s to the 1960s), the collection contains more than 700 linear feet of correspondence, accounts, and other business records. Donated by the grandnephews of Manuel Rionda to the University of Florida at Gainesville in 1981, the collection offers a window into the sugar business—in Cuba and the United States—through the life and work of one of the most important sugar merchants from the 1880s to the 1930s. Born in Asturias, Spain, in 1854, Manuel Rionda lived and worked in both Cuba and the United States from the age of sixteen until his death in 1943. As tens of thousands of young Spaniards had done for nearly four hundred years, Rionda immigrated to the Americas in search of his fortune. As had his two older brothers before him, he joined his uncle's merchant company in Cuba and then spent four years in school in Farmington, Maine. He spent much of the 1880s in New York City, working through his family networks to build their sugar plantations and export business in Cuba. In 1896 Rionda joined Czarnikow, MacDougall and Company in London, the world's greatest sugar brokers. Although he came to own many sugar plantations, Rionda was primarily a merchant, and McAvoy describes her book as "the story of a merchant among bankers and the creation, existence, and eventual metamorphosis of a sugar company. As such, it is an object lesson in the geopolitics of sugar" (p. 2).

Rionda eventually took control of the brokerage firm and moved it to Wall Street under the name Czarnikow-Rionda. In 1915–1916 he created the Cuba Cane Sugar Corporation (chartered in New Jersey), which McAvoy describes as "the single greatest sugar company" in Cuba and "perhaps the world" (p. 5). Her book meticulously details Rionda's rise to power in the sugar business, as well as the creation and development of the Cuba Cane Sugar Corporation and its eventual demise with the great sugar crisis of the 1920s and the Great Depression. This is very much an insider's view of the shifting fortunes of sugar companies, "of the vast sums of money their operations required," of the capital "raised, what profits accrued, and who benefited financially" (p. 5).

In the 1920s and 1930s Cuba Cane became a modern business enterprise under the intense pressure of creditors and the depressed sugar market. After bountiful years during World War I and the so-called Dance of the Millions in the early 1920s, the bottom dropped out of the sugar market in the mid-1920s. Faced with rising tariffs, competition from beet sugar in the United States and Europe, and rising production in U.S. territories (Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico), Cuban sugar producers coped with overwhelming challenges. The result was an enormous rise in U.S. control of the sugar industry in Cuba. Consequently, Manuel Rionda and his family lost control of their commanding share of the world sugar market and many of their plantations. In a very brief postscript, McAvoy also notes that the third generation of the family, Rionda's grandnephews, all lost their holdings with the rise of Fidel Castro and...