Manuel Rionda

Manuel Rionda was born in 1854 in Noreña, Spain.^[1][2] The Rionda family began investing in Cuban sugar in the 1860s.^[3] By 1870, when Rionda was sixteen, Rionda emigrated to Cuba.^[2]

Rionda co-founded the Czarnikow-Rionda Company with Julius Caesar Czarnikow in 1909.^[4] By 1915, he co-founded the Cuba Cane Sugar Company with his family.^[2]

Rionda was the owner of sugar plantations in Cuba.^[1] Prior to the 1930s, Czarnikow-Rionda Company "sold 40 per cent of Cuba's sugar".^[2]

Rionda married Harriet Clarke,^[1] and they resided at Rio Vista estate, a 300-acre estate in Alpine, New Jersey.^[1][5] They had no children, but they raised his orphaned nephew, Manuel Enrique Rionda, who later resided on the Glen Goin estate in Alpine with his wife, Ellen Goin.^[1]