Dissident Cuban doctor flying to Argentina

HAVANA — A once prominent neurosurgeon who became a political pariah after criticizing Cuba’s health system flew to Argentina on Saturday, quickly taking advantage of the communist government’s surprise decision to let her leave the island after years of rejecting her requests.

A day after being granted travel papers, Dr. Hilda Molina went to visit her ailing 90-year-old mother, who was allowed to leave Cuba months ago, and the grandchildren who were born to her son and her Argentine daughter-in-law after they left the island in 1994.

“It’s too much,” Molina said at Havana’s airport. “The children, my son whom I haven’t seen in 15 years, the grandchildren I’ve never met and my mother who is ill.”

In an emotional parting, she broke into tears at the boarding gate.

Molina’s travel documents are good for several months, but she said she had not decided whether to return to Cuba.

Molina, who once posed for high-profile photos with Fidel Castro, was a well-known physician at a government institution until 1994, when she resigned after questioning the ethics of using human stem cell tissue in studies on treating ailments like Parkinson’s disease. That same year her son Roberto Quinones left Cuba with his Argentine wife.

International human rights groups for years lobbied the Cuban government to give Molina permission to travel abroad, decrying its practice of 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, saying it spends too much training them to allow them to emigrate for higher salaries elsewhere. Cubans who dare to openly criticize Cuba’s system, like Molina, are also often denied permission to leave the country.

Molina filed paperwork periodically seeking for permission to travel outside Cuba for 10 years and recently began the process again, expecting to be turned down. When her mother fell ill, she drafted letters to Cuban President Raul Castro and other top government officials, and was shocked to be approved. She picked up the travel documents Friday.

Before boarding the plane, Molina urged other Cuban dissidents who have been denied overseas travel to keep trying and not lose hope.

“They should ask for their rights, like I did. They mustn’t remain silent,” she said. “They don’t have to create problems, just simply claim their family rights, which is something so basic and simple.”