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That's exactly what would happen: the US would not freak out about it.

Russia was just busy flying bombers 40 miles off the coast of California last week. Last time I checked, we haven't declared war on Russia for it. They regularly do the same thing with their navy in various ways, whether off the Atlantic or Pacific coast, or near Cuba / Florida waters.

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Cuban missile crisis in 1962?

There's a pretty big difference in China sending a couple of warships to the gulf and USSR setting up a nuclear missile base with missiles pointed at the US on Cuba.

Nuclear missles or "90000 tons of diplomacy" are both certain kinds of deterrence, nothing more, nothing less. If US does not have those carrier combat groups, China wouldn't care either.

Instant destruction that you can't defend against is not the same as an annoying ship floating around off your coast.

The proper comparison to cuba is Star Wars type missile shields. And USSR/Russia has long been quite opposed to that, for good reason.

I'm going to sound like an apologist, but the Cold War nuclear miltary-political calculus was very different pre-ICMB+MAD on both sides of the Soviet-US split.

SLBMs were just being developed in the early 60s, and so Cuban-based missiles represented a novel, more credible first-strike threat given distance (~20 minutes flight time).

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