For the first time, Castro's Cuba is described from the perspective of a young Soviet female engineer working there in the late 60s. The timeliness of Paulina's revelations is underscored by the recent revival of Russian military ambitions globally and in Cuba.

This is an authentic first-hand 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 beginning in 1969. The authors draw back the Cuban/Soviet curtain on an undisclosed Soviet navy nuclear confrontation with the United States.

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 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 20 years. Domestic political considerations during the Vietnam War kept the US Government silent.

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.