The authors draw back the Cuban/Soviet curtain on an undisclosed Soviet navy nuclear confrontation lasting 20 years with the United States and on the cover-up by the American government of an aggressive undercover spy war with Fidel Castro - the world's most idiosyncratic, brilliant, but obsessively vindictive psychopath and power-hungry megalomaniac leader.

Standing at the crossroads of autobiography and contemporary history, The Sea Is Only Knee Deep 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, 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 base 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 two decades. Domestic political considerations during the Vietnam War kept the US government silent.

This dramatic personal story, based on a young woman's experience from the real world, is often more fascinating than any fictional thriller. Paulina's tender and loving relationship with her father served her as the only guide through the dangerous and dark period of Soviet state tyranny. She resisted the massive false propaganda, misery, demoralization, state anti-Semitism, and degradation of dignity that were used to control the Soviet public for 75 years of its existence.