Manuel Rionda y Polledo.
Internal memoranda,
1904-1914.
1 linear ft. (3 boxes)
Series 5 consists of copies and originals of memoranda between the Czarnikow-Rionda Company and C. Czarnikow, Ltd. of London, and between the Havana and New York offices of Czarnikow-Rionda. The memoranda were generated during Manuel Rionda's trips to Cuba during the harvest months. As such, the memoranda complement the letters found in Series 3 and Series 12. In general, the correspondence runs from December through March, but sometimes as early as September and as late as July. There are no memoranda for the harvests of 1905-1906 and 1907-1908.
Many of the memos are divided into subject headings, and a continuous correspondence on a particular subject can be traced over a period of time. Part of Series 5 was found in five loose leaf binders, four of which had numbered pages and indexes for each subject heading. Other memoranda were found with materials now in Series 1. (Several memoranda from the 1902-1903 harvest can be found in Series 1 under Czarnikow, MacDougall & Co.)
The correspondence between Rionda and London is often bitter and reflects Rionda's growing dissatisfaction with the British stockholders. The correspondence from Rionda in Cuba is rich in comments, gossip, and opinions on political and economic conditions in the early years of the Cuban Republic. There is also some discussion of the sugar industry in Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the Caribbean. The letters from London often comment on the European beet sugar market and world market conditions.