Cuba drops ban on dissident doctor leaving island
HAVANA — Cuba has abruptly dropped its refusal to let a prominent physician who defied Fidel Castro by criticizing the communist-run island’s health care system leave the country, allowing her to visit family in Argentina after years of denials.
Dr. Hilda Molina told The Associated Press on Friday that she had been given permission to travel internationally and would fly to Argentina on Saturday.
“It was a surprise,” Molina said in an interview at her Havana home, adding that she turned in the normal, periodic paperwork again seeking permission to travel weeks ago and had expected to be denied.
Molina said that after she found out her 90-year-old mother was ill in Argentina, she sent letters to President Raul Castro and several other top Cuban officials and also sought help from Roman Catholic leaders.
Hours earlier in Buenos Aires, Argentine President Cristina Fernandez announced the decision, expressing “much satisfaction.” Her left-leaning administration has had warm relations with Cuba and Raul Castro, who formally took over as Cuba’s head of state from his elder brother Fidel in February 2008.
But during a visit to Cuba earlier this year, Fernandez surprised some by failing to meet with Molina, and the physician expressed doubt that Fernandez had much to do with the Cuban government’s decision.
“I don’t know if there was” intervention by the Fernandez administration, she said. “I have not had any contact with the current (Argentine) ambassador.”
Argentine news media has given extensive attention to Molina’s struggle to see the grandchildren who were born to her son and her Argentine daughter-in-law after they left Cuba in 1994. Her elderly mother was given official permission to head to Argentina and did so several months ago.
International human rights groups for years lobbied the Cuban government to give Molina permission to leave. Washington-based Human Rights Watch in February featured Molina’s case among examples of Cuba denying exit visas to several categories of applicants, including health care professionals.
While Cuba has sent thousands of doctors abroad on official aid missions, it restricts individual foreign travel by physicians, arguing it has made too heavy investment in training them to see them freely emigrate for higher salaries elsewhere. Dissidents, or those who dare openly criticize Cuba’s single-party system, are also often denied permission to leave the country. Cuba has free health care for all its citizens.
Molina, who once posed for high-profile photos with Fidel Castro, was a well-known neurosurgeon at a government institution until 1994, when she resigned after questioning the ethics of using human stem cell tissue in studies on treating ailments such as Parkinson’s disease.
That same year her son Roberto Quinones left the country with his Argentine wife.
Molina said Friday she had been issued a travel card good for several months, but one that included the possibility for renewal, or a return to Cuba, if she so chooses.
“I would like to return, I love my country … but in the state my mother is in today, I wouldn’t leave her,” she said when asked about an eventual return to Cuba. “My mother is very close to the end.”
Her daughter-in-law, Veronica de Quinones, also told Argentine cable channel Todo Noticias she did not know if Molina would stay in Argentina or return to Cuba.
Molina’s son told Argentine Radio 10 that Cuba’s decision, “surprised all the family with great joy, because it’s something we have wanted for many years.”
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