By Madeline Baró Diaz
and Ruth Morris Miami Bureau

A prominent human rights organization on Wednesday accused the United States and Cuba of imposing travel restrictions that wrench families apart and violate basic rights.

The report by New York-based Human Rights Watch criticized U.S. policies that limit travel by Cuban-Americans to the island and Cuban policies that limit exit permits.

"This is a human rights issue," the report's author, Daniel Wilkinson, said at a news conference at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables. "There is an internationally recognized right that's at stake here, and that is the right to freedom of movement."

The report mentioned the Bush administration's decision last year to limit Cuban-Americans to one visit to relatives on the island every three years. The new rules also reduced the categories of relatives that qualified for visits, eliminating aunts, uncles and cousins from the list.

U.S. restrictions on travel to Cuba are part of the 40-year embargo on the island nation. Human Rights Watch recommended that the U.S. abolish the embargo, arguing that it has not accomplished its goal of bringing democracy to Cuba.

José Miguel Vivanco, executive director of Human Rights Watch's Americas Division, said the embargo, which is opposed by many other nations, detracts from Cuba's "deplorable" human rights record.

"The Cuba embargo has become a bigger issue in the rest of the world than the Cuban human rights record which is a shame," Vivanco said. "We don't understand why the Cuban families have to pay a price for an ill-conceived policy toward the government of Fidel Castro."

The report also shone a spotlight on Cuba's stranglehold on travel for its citizens. Castro's government does not allow Cubans to leave the island or return without permission and has a longstanding policy of denying exit visas to family members of people who left Cuba without authorization.

Cuba also denies certain professionals, such as those in the health industry, exit visas and does not always allow Cubans who travel abroad to bring their children with them, the report said.

According to the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, Cuba denied exit visas to 1,750 Cubans issued U.S. visas in the 18 months leading up to March 2005. Roughly half were healthcare professionals.

"We are hostages of the system," said Dr. Hilda Molina, a prominent neurologist who has been seeking permission to leave Cuba to visit her son in Argentina for more than 10 years. When she first requested an exit permit, she said, a Cuban immigration official told her, "your brain belongs to the country."

Molina left her post at the head of a neurology treatment center in 1994 to protest what she described as preferential treatment given to patients from overseas. Today she cares for her ailing mother, and helps church groups sort through donated medicines that come mixed together in cardboard boxes. She has not seen her son since he immigrated to Argentina 12 years ago, nor has she met her two grandsons.

"I have a debt with him," Molina said of her son, referring to how she had left his early care to her mother while she studied and then served a three-year humanitarian mission in Algeria. "I thought when I was old I'd have more time with him."

Neither the U.S. State Department nor Cuban officials responded to requests for comment on the report.

U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Miami, a supporter of the embargo and tough measures against Cuba, blasted the Human Rights Watch report.

"There is no moral equivalence in comparing our policies with that of the Castro regime's," Ros-Lehtinen said in a statement. "Our goal is simple and honorable: Freedom and democracy for the 11 million Cubans who live at the whim of a madman."