At the beginning of March of 1943 the first steps had been taken in Washington and Havana to reach an agreement of collaboration between the national meteorological services of Cuba and the United States of America (Higgs, 1949) that included, among other aspects, the installation of a station of atmospheric sounding in Havana. The agreements had been channeled through the abilities granted to the “Interdepartmental Committee on Cooperation with American Republics”, subordinated to the State Department.

In the United States, the USWB had received authorization to give Cuba those advanced technical means and therefore, its director, Professor Francis W. Reichelderfer, commissioned meteorologist Ralph Higgs to act as its personal representative in connection with the project, and delegated upon him the authority to direct the process of transfer of the at the time novel system. Higgs took the necessary provisions for the adaptation and application of the technical norms of the instrumental to the conditions of Cuba.

By the Cuban part participated the director of the National Observatory, and the officials of the Navy commodore José Aguila Ruíz (Chief of staff) and ship lieutenant Oscar Riverí and Ortíz. This last one carried out the connection duties between Washington and Havana.

The agreement represented an initial investment of $20 000.00 (U. S. D.), granted by the United States in order to finance the equipment and the necessary technical infrastructure, including the supply of helium for the globes. To the Cuban part it corresponded the construction of the ground facilities and to designate the technical and support personnel (Millás, 1945).

As part of the supplied equipment it was included a teletypewriter transmitter-receiver that connected the National Observatory with the office of the USWB in Miami, and from that city with Washington, in order to facilitate and to improve the flow of data involved in the exchange of operative meteorological information.

It was only left to designate a specialist to assume the handling of the equipment and instruments. For this purpose, the direction of the National Observatory named a young, recently graduated electrical engineer (1940) at the University of Havana: Luis Larragoiti Alonso (1914-1998) who, among other qualities, had in its curriculum graduate degree studies in the specialty of thermodynamics in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1942.

Larragoiti traveled again to the United States in order to pass a training course in the handling of radiosondes. He studied the most advanced texts and manuals in that moment, so much in the old airport of Washington -where a station existed for the launching and monitoring of radiosondes-, as in the laboratories of calibration of instruments of the USWB. The course included a period of training with the technicians of the firm Friez Instruments, a division of the Bendix corporation, manufacturer of holosteric instruments and radio transmitters.

The training started at the beginning of June 1944 and it was programmed until mid July, but in fact it was prolonged until final of August, for the sake of building the qualification of Larragoiti in a more complete way. The aspects relative to the maintenance of the equipment had enormous importance, because, for technical reasons, the repair and calibration of the instruments could only be made in American laboratories.