Freed Cuban prisoner, Ariel Sigler, boarded an airplane in Havana on Wednesday. <br /><br />Sigler heads for Miami, where he will stay in a clinic for health treatments. <br /><br />Dissident Sigler was sentenced to 20 years in 2003, but released from the prison in Cuba on June 12 for health reasons. <br /><br />Shortly after Sigler’s transfer, the Cuban government announced the release of some 52 other political prisoners, many of them locked up with Sigler in 2003. <br /><br />Now wheelchair-bound, Sigler's wife Noelia Pedraza helped him out of a car at the Havana airport for a trip Sigler says, is bittersweet. <br /><br />[Ariel Sigler, Released Prisoner]: (male, Spanish) <br /> "When one leaves the country where one was born, there are really mixed feelings of happiness and pain--happiness because I'm going to a clinic to cure myself, but pain because I'm leaving my homeland. As I was saying before, I'm leaving my brother Guido Sigler, who is being held at the Aguica prison in Matanza Province." <br /><br />The U.S. government granted the former prisoner a visa for humanitarian reasons. Sigler is the only one of the recently freed prisoners to travel to the United States. <br /><br />The U.S. government, last week, offered refuge for freed dissidents and their families. <br /><br />Pedraza, who will not travel with her husband, says it is difficult, but hopes for the best. <br /><br />[Noelia Pedraza, Sigler’s Wife]: <br />"It's hard for me. I feel a lot of pain because he has to leave the country. But I have to let him leave for his well-being, so he can get better.” <br /><br />President, Raul Castro, released the prisoners on the pretext that they go to Spain.
