The Sea is Only Knee Deep - Volume 1

For the first time, Castro's Cuba is described in The Sea is Only Knee Deep from the perspective of a young Soviet female engineer working there from the late 1960s- to the early 70th. This memoir of Paulina is an authentic firsthand story of a young female Soviet defector who made a choice to risk her life rather than to become a KGB informant and honey trap in Havana during the publicly unknown second Cuban missile crisis. The authors draw back the Cuban/Soviet curtain on an undisclosed Soviet naval nuclear confrontation with the United States.
Standing at the crossroads of autobiography and contemporary history, Paulina's memoir presents an intimate and bittersweet portrait of the coming of age of a fiercely independent Jewish girl, raised by her father, a former sea captain, in the Black Sea city of Odessa, Ukraine (called Odesa today) during and after Stalin's last decade of Soviet power. Interwoven with her childhood narrative of a streetwise kid, deftly dodging the suffocating strictures of Communist tyranny, is a Cold War thriller arising from Paulina's personal involvement with a top-secret Soviet submarine base in Cuba, the indignity of attempted rape, the relentless pressure from the KGB to become their informer, and her desperate plans of escape to freedom.
The Soviet base in Cienfuegos was home to a fleet of Soviet nuclear subs armed with ballistic and cruise missiles with nuclear warheads aimed at America. Concealed from the Western public and hidden beneath the ocean, this Soviet submarine base served as a major nuclear arms missile platform in the backyard of the United States where it operated secretly and in defiance of international treaties for over 20 years, but the domestic political considerations during the Vietnam War kept the US Government silent. For the benefit of detente, the American administration pretended that the Cienfuegos crisis was solved in secret diplomacy. It was not true: the Cienfuegos Soviet submarine base continued operating for 22 years until Russia closed it in 1992. This secret second Soviet Navy nuclear adventurism, threatening a confrontation with the United States, dramatically affected the lives of Paulina, her husband, and their two small children. The memoir describes how and why Paulina was co-opted to work as a translator for a top-secret project building a naval base in Cuba for Soviet submarines equipped with nuclear warhead missiles - all camouflaged as a new civil cargo port in Cienfuegos and hidden beneath the ocean. Once again, the Soviet military excelled in its strategy of deception, traditionally recognized in the Soviet Union as the highest operational military art.
Paulina's memoir is sprinkled with stories from the lives of her family's five generations of Odessan Jews and the revelations of the Soviet (now Russian) cynical political manipulations in Cuba when in the late 1960s, thousands of Soviet navy personnel and technical military experts were sent to Cuba as civilians under agricultural, technical, and cultural visas.
At two years of age, Paulina lost her mother to starvation during the second Holodomor in Ukraine, but the tender and loving relationship with her father served as her guide through the dangerous and dark period of Soviet history. She resisted the massive false propaganda, misery, demoralization, state anti-Semitism, and degradation of dignity which were used to control the Soviet public for 75 years. This is an emotional, suspenseful, and vivid tale about the virus of despotic oppression, the wars of disinformation, the perils of the Soviet security agencies, the protective love of a wise father for his daughter, and the bravery and good fortune of a young mother with two small children.