Cohomological non-rigidity of generalized real Bott manifolds of height 2

We investigate when two generalized real Bott manifolds of height 2 have isomorphic cohomology rings with Z/2 coefficients and also when they are diffeomorphic. It turns out that cohomology rings with Z/2 coefficients do not distinguish those manifolds up to diffeomorphism in general. This gives a counterexample to the cohomological rigidity problem for real toric manifolds posed in \cite{ka-ma08}. We also prove that generalized real Bott manifolds of height 2 are diffeomorphic if they are homotopy equivalent.