Freed Cuban prisoner, Ariel Sigler, boarded an airplane in Havana on Wednesday.
Sigler heads for Miami, where he will stay in a clinic for health treatments.
Dissident Sigler was sentenced to 20 years in 2003, but released from the prison in Cuba on June 12 for health reasons.
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.
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.
[Ariel Sigler, Released Prisoner]: (male, Spanish)
"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."
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.
The U.S. government, last week, offered refuge for freed dissidents and their families.
Pedraza, who will not travel with her husband, says it is difficult, but hopes for the best.
[Noelia Pedraza, Sigler’s Wife]:
"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.”
President, Raul Castro, released the prisoners on the pretext that they go to Spain.
