The photon-number distribution (PND) at the output of a cascade of erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs), with coherent light at the input, turns out to be the noncentral-negative-binomial (NNB) distribution, even in the presence of intervening loss, provided that the normalized bandwidth is the same for all amplifiers. The probability of error (PE) for a cascade of several high-gain EDFAs is essentially the same as that for a single EDFA. The performance of a sequence of postamplifiers is superior to that of a sequence of preamplifiers.