Here's how to clear out all the man garbage when accessing a RedHat 8.0 system using Cygwin's rxvt (and other terminals):
Edit /etc/sysconfig/i18n to change the encoding from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-15, the revised Latin-1 encoding:
#LANG="en_US.UTF-8" LANG="en_US.ISO-8859-15" SUPPORTED="en_US.UTF-8:en_US:en:pt_PT.UTF-8:pt_PT:pt" SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"