ABSTRACT
The US objection to servicing of submarines in Cuba rendered the military rationale for Soviet visits less important. If one intent of Soviet naval visits to the Caribbean was to establish precedents for acceptable behavior, that objective had already been accomplished from 1969 to 1974. In late 1977, the submarine visits to Cuba resumed. A second potential Cuban crisis was more quickly and clearly deflected by the two countries in 1978. US intelligence identified eighteen or twenty crated MiG-23 aircraft on board Soviet ships arriving in Cuba in late April 1978. The United States did not possess the human intelligence sources in Cuba that might have been used to confirm the mission of the new aircraft. The United States thus had no means of its own to determine conclusively whether the MiG-23s sent to Cuba in 1978 could carry nuclear weapons. In 1970 and 1978, US intelligence on Soviet behavior and military hardware in Cuba was precise and timely.
