Dr. Hilda Molina, one of Cuba's top neurosurgeons, a one-time member of the Cuban parliament, and a confidant of Fidel Castro, made the mistake of criticizing her nation's medical care system.

Molina exposed Cuba's two-tier medical system that enabled rich foreigners to come in for treatment at first-class facilities in Cuba, paying in dollars, while ordinary Cubans got some of the most atrocious medical care on the planet.

According to The American Thinker magazine, Molina was seriously punished for her revelations, as well as objecting to Castro's fetal stem-cell research program on the grounds of conscience.

In the end, she lost her job, her parliament position, her livelihood and everything she'd worked for.

"Last December, she tried to leave Cuba to visit her Argentinian son, his wife and their children," the Thinker reported. "There was a showdown at the Argentinian Embassy and much to its disgrace, the Argentines refused to give her a visa, shoving her back to Castro's waiting agents on the outside. Nothing has been heard from her since."

Dr. Molina was not alone in decrying the shabby state of medical care inflicted on ordinary Cubans under Castro. The American Thinker cited a Cuban source that took on the issue head-on.

Wrote the Cuban source, babalublog.com "Every single time the island of Cuba and Fidel Castro's revolution are covered anywhere in the media, one of the points always mentioned is Cuba's free healthcare. You can practically time it. If it's in print, you get the lead issue in the first and second paragraph, a mention of Fidel Castro or one of his cronies in the third paragraph, and then the plug for the lauded free healthcare available to Cubans in the fourth. I don’t think I've ever read an article about Castro or Cuba where the 'healthcare' isn’t mentioned.

"Every single Castro supporter clings to this healthcare thing like it is some kind of holy grail. In a debate, the fact that Cuba has the most political prisoners in the world is ignored. The fact that Cubans on the island lack even the most basic of necessities is ignored. Tourism apartheid is ignored. Everything is ignored save for the free healthcare and 100% literacy.

"Of course, none of these 'free healthcare!' cheerleaders have ever been to a Cuban hospital. They've never been to a Cuban clinic. Hospitals and clinics serving the average Cuban, that is."

The writer then published photographs showing cockroach-infested hospital rooms: "Cockroaches. Twenty-seven of them to be exact. All swept together after having been squashed by patients and patrons of El Hospital Clinico Quirurgico de la Habana."

Other photos showed a hospital interior that would be shut down in the U.S. because of its shockingly unsanitary conditions.

"Well," wrote the source, "this is just a small reality of Castro's lauded healthcare in Cuba. This is a hospital in Havana, one Castro once called 'one of the most modern and best ones in the country.' The hospital is in the nation's capital and the most populated city in the country. Imagine the conditions of hospitals in smaller cities or rural areas."

Moreover "this is not a hospital that caters to foreigners. This is a hospital strictly for the Cuban people. Foreigners are treated quite differently and their facilities are state of the art and, at least, sanitary.

The photos, taken by two journalists, María Elena Morejón and Carlos Wotzkow, can be accessed through babalublog.com. Wrote the source, "I urge each and every one of you to check the ... photographs so that next time, when some Fidel-loving apologist mentions Cuba's free healthcare, you remember what they're really talking about: the myth of Cuba's vaunted healthcare system."