who joined the Cuban Liberation Army upon learning of the death of his brother Wecenlao in the battlefields of Cuba. Marin, who was given the rank of lieutenant, befriended and fought alongside José Martí. In November 1897, Lt. Marin died from the wounds he received in a skirmish against the Spanish Army. José Semidei Rodríguez from Yauco, Puerto Rico, fought in various battles in the Cuban War of Independence (1895–1898). After Cuba gained its independence he joined the Cuban National Army with the rank of brigadier general. Semidei Rodríguez continued to serve in Cuba as a diplomat upon his retirement from the military. Spanish–American War In 1890, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, a member of the Navy War Board and leading U.S. strategic thinker, wrote a book titled The Influence of Sea Power upon History where he argued for the creation of a large and powerful navy modeled after the British Royal Navy. Part of his strategy called for the acquisition of colonies in the Caribbean Sea which would serve as coaling and naval stations and which would serve as strategic points of defense upon the construction of a canal in the Isthmus. This was not a new idea: William H. Seward, the former Secretary of State under the administrations of various presidents, among them Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant, had stressed that a canal be built either in Honduras, Nicaragua or Panama and that the United States annex the Dominican Republic and purchase Puerto Rico and Cuba. The idea of annexing the Dominican Republic failed to receive the approval of the U.S. Senate and Spain did not accept the 160 million dollars the U.S. offered for Puerto Rico and Cuba. Since 1894 the Naval War College had been formulating plans for war with possible adversaries. One of these plans included military operations in Puerto Rican waters. Not only was Puerto Rico considered valuable as a naval station, Puerto Rico and Cuba were also major producers of sugar, a valuable commercial commodity the United States lacked. The United States declared war on Spain in 1898 following the loss of the battleship in Havana harbor, Cuba. One of the United States' principal objectives in the Spanish–American War was to take control of Spanish possessions Puerto Rico and Cuba in the Atlantic, and the Philippines and Guam in the Pacific. . The Spanish sent the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Puerto Rican Provisional Battalions