The earliest records in the Braga Brothers Collection date to 1860 and bear the name of a commission merchant, Lewis Benjamin. Benjamin was one of many traders buying and selling a variety of commodities in Manhattan's vibrant financial district. In 1873, Benjamin and Joaquín Rionda y Polledo (1850-1889) formed the partnership of Benjamin, Rionda and Company. Joaquín Rionda was the middle brother in a family of six sisters (Maria, Isidora, Gregoria, Ramona, Concepción, and Bibiana) and three brothers (Francisco, Joaquín and Manuel), offspring of Don Bernardo de la Rionda y Alvarez and Doña Josefa Polledo y Mata. All were born in the village of Noreña in the Oviedo district of Asturias.

The eldest brother, Francisco (1844-1898), resided in Cuba most of his life. It is uncertain when he arrived in Cuba, but he worked with his uncle, Joaquín Polledo, in the firm Polledo, Rionda and Company. The company was a sugar export house with its office and warehouse in Matanzas. The family also owned sugar plantations near that Cuban port. By 1875, Francisco had married Elena de la Torriente, the daughter of one of Cuba's wealthiest sugar barons. His father-in-law, Cosmé de la Torriente, awarded him management of a sugar estate dubbed La Elena after Francisco's bride.

The Polledos and Riondas also enjoyed a long and profitable association with George S. Hunt, owner of the Eagle Sugar Refinery at Portland, Maine. In addition to the refinery, Hunt operated a fleet of ships that traded primarily in Maine lumber products and Cuban sugar and molasses. Hunt took under his wing Joaquín and Manuel when they came to America and oversaw their preparation for the business world. Joaquín spent his adolescent years at the Abbott School in Farmington, Maine, before he settled in New York City. Manuel (1854-1943) left Spain in 1870 and followed Joaquín at the Abbott School before joining his brother at Benjamin, Rionda and Company in 1874.

In the meantime, Francisco and his uncle enlarged their Cuban sugar holdings. By 1877, they had acquired the Central China and contracted with Franklin Farrel of the Farrel Foundry and Machine Company of Ansonia, Connecticut, to modernize the estate's industrial plant. However, debts incurred by the purchase of expensive mill machinery, coupled with declining sugar prices, forced the bankruptcy of Polledo, Rionda and Co. in December, 1878. $400,000 of that debt was to Rionda, Benjamin and Co.

As part of a 1880 court settlement of Polledo, Rionda's remaining assets, the Rionda brothers acquired the Central China and the Matanzas warehouses. Joaquín subsequently moved to Cuba to take charge of the Central China. Francisco continued at the Elena estate until the de la Torrientes sold it. He then joined Joaquín at the Central China. Manuel also moved to Cuba and assumed control of the Matanzas warehouses for a brief period. While all three of the brothers were in Cuba, the New York business was left in the hands of a partner, Hugh Kelly.

Quickly, though, the business network began to crumble. By 1883, Rionda, Benjamin and Co. was declared insolvent. Manuel returned to New York and attempted a new partnership with Kelly, but that lasted only a year. The Matanzas operations also failed and the Central China eventually became the property of the New York Sugar Manufacturing Company, established by Farrell, Kelly and Lewis Cooke.

The Riondas then focused their energies on sugar properties they acquired in the vicinity of Sancti Spiritus in Santa Clara province. Manuel returned to Cuba briefly to work with his brothers. By 1886, though, he was back in New York working with the firm of J. M. Ceballos and Co. The record trail in Record Group 1, however, stops in 1885. Record Group 2 starts in 1895, and there are no records in the collection for the intervening years. The memoirs and recollections of family members (see also: Addendum) recount the history of the intervening years.

Record Group 1 of the Braga Brothers Collection is a valuable resource for studies of early North American investments in the Cuban sugar industry. It also documents the Spanish communities in the United States and Cuba and the important role they played in the development of Cuba's sugar industry. The Benjamins' business interests are also well documented in the correspondence with Lewin and Sohr of Antwerp and Truninger and Company of London. Record Group 1 includes correspondence, bound and unbound business records, shipping contracts and other maritime documents, legal papers, and trade circulars. A small amount of family correspondence can also be found.

Record Group 1 is divided into six series.

Series 6 includes cargo pouches, charter parties, maritime protests, insurance policies, and contractual records. The largest part of the collection consists of cargo pouches. The original pouch envelopes, many of which were wrapped in bundles marked "consignment envelopes," have been retained.

A typical cargo pouch contains sales receipts, import slips, invoices, insurance receipts, memoranda and charter memoranda. Some pouches (especially 1876 and 1877) may also include towing bills, quarantine bills, shipwright bills, bills of lading, storage receipts, consulate bills, custom house receipts, warden's office legislative acts, bank correspondence, sugar weight return notices, marine protests, import bonds and trust receipts. Sugar transactions are prominent throughout most years, but also included are railroad grain transactions (1879), iron rails (1880) and bat guano sales (1882). Some cargo pouches contain charter parties and have been labeled as such. Charter parties found independent of cargo pouches are listed separately.

Box 6 contains insurance policies, receipts and ledgers (1870-1885) related to ships, cargoes on ships, and cargoes stored in wharves and bulkheads. The ledger entitled "Marine Insurance G.R. and Co." lists vessels with merchandise, exit ports, dates and amounts of insurance (in gold or currency), and compliments material found in many of the cargo pouches.

The majority of the maritime papers are written in English with some in Spanish and a few in French and German.

Series 31 consists primarily of business correspondence received at the early Rionda trading houses in New York City. Also included in the series are copies of letters sent from the trading houses, but most of the outgoing correspondence will be found in the letterbooks in Series 32. Some internal business correspondence, including memoranda, is also found along with contracts and other business documents. The series also contains a small number of private letters and documents from family members in Spain and Cuba. The majority of letters revolve around the purchase and sale of various commodities, including sugar. The Riondas interest in sugar production factors more heavily in the later years of the series. Of particular interest are the letters and documents related to the modernization of several mills in the 1880s. Discussion related to the abolition of slavery can be found in the correspondence of the brothers, most notably in 1879.

The materials were bundled with titles and dates written on the bundle wrappers. Unless otherwise noted in brackets, the folder titles here are the same as those that were on the wrappers. About a tenth of the series was found loose with no identification. Those letters have been arranged by date and marked in the contents lists with an asterisk. A considerable portion of the series was lost to rodent damage.

Legal size documents are in box 8, oversize documents in box 9.

Series 32 consists of twenty letterbooks containing copies of outgoing correspondence from the Rionda trading houses in New York City. Eight of the volumes contain letters from Rionda, Benjamin and Co., exclusively, while the remainder carry correspondence from various houses. A small amount of personal and family correspondence is also included.

The letterbooks do not form a continuous series and there is considerable overlapping of dates. Special care should be taken when looking for specific dates.

In general the records of this series are in good condition, with only minor mutilation and some ink fading.

Series 33 consists of trade circulars and market reports received by the various firms associated with Record Group 1, including Rionda, Benjamin and Company. Most of the circulars and reports relate to the sugar trade and were issued in the United States, Cuba, and Europe. There are also publications on other commodities traded by Rionda, Benjamin.

Digitized items from the series can be found here.

Series 34 contains the ledgers, journals, and other bound financial records of Benjamin, Rionda and Company and several related firms. An interesting feature of this series is the inclusion of several items from the years prior to Joaquin Rionda's partnership with Lewis Benjamin. This includes ledgers from A. Wolf, one of several business associates of Lewis Benjamin. The series also contains a cashbook for the Central China.

Most of the daily correspondence of the Rionda trading houses was in the form of international cables. The availability of cheap telegrahpic messaging allowed smaller and newer firms as Rionda, Benjamin and Company to compete with older established firms. Cable messages relayed the price and availability of specific commodities. To save money, commercial codes were employed to reduce the number of letters used in a single cable. Series 59 contains only a sampling of the hundreds of thousands of largely undeciperable cables originally foound in the collection. Series 59 contains several telegraph code books employed by Rionda, Benjamin and Company and Gomez, Rionda and Company, a cable book containing copies of outgoing cable messages, and some examples of incoming cables.