Fidel Castro is engaging in the worst type of hypocrisy when he portrays himself as a champion of family rights. The case of Elian Gonzalez, rescued off the Florida coast, has generated commentary throughout the world and mass demonstrations in Cuba portraying the United States as an enemy of family reunification.

Ironically, only a few minutes from the demonstrations at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, lives Dr. Hilda Molina, an internationally respected neurosurgeon. She has been pleading with Castro since 1996 to allow her to travel abroad to visit her son and her 5-year-old grandson.

Molina is no longer allowed to practice medicine since protesting Havana's ``medical apartheid,'' which sells medicine and surgical procedures to foreigners while denying the same benefits to average Cubans. She resigned from the Communist Party and Cuba's National Assembly.

Many Cubans are not permitted to join their families abroad, although high-profile cases sometimes embarrass Havana into action.

Paquito D' Rivera, the world- famous jazz saxophone player, while changing planes in Madrid on a world tour in 1978 told his security detail (one accompanies all famous Cubans abroad) that he had left his saxophone at the waiting room. Allowed to return for it, he instead asked for political asylum in Spain.

It took nine years for appeals by prominent musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie, to persuade Castro to allow D'Rivera's son to join his father.

Also, Havana hardly displayed a soft spot for the family of Cuban air force Major Orestes Lorenzo, who landed his MiG on a Florida airport in 1992. When Lorenzo, who grew up under the revolution and studied in Moscow defected, his wife, Vicky, said in Cuba that she knew nothing of his plans. But Lorenzo, denounced as a traitor by Castro, immediately began efforts to bring his wife and two sons to the United States.

Havana responded, Lorenzo recounts in his book, Wings of the Morning, by sending psychologists to tell his children that their father was a traitor and his wife that Lorenzo had found another woman.

Summoned by Gen. Raul Castro, Mrs. Lorenzo was told that neither she nor her children would ever be allowed to leave.

``If Lorenzo had the guts to leave with one of my MiGs,'' Castro said, ``maybe he has the guts to come back and get his family.''

Lorenzo went on a hunger strike in Madrid and pleaded with the media to take up his case. When those efforts failed, he flew a small plane back to Cuba, hugging the waves on the over-ocean journey to elude Cuban radar. He landed on a country road, barely missing a truck, and picked up his wife and two sons.

Once in the United States, Vicky Lorenzo said that she had known about her husband's escape plan but that acknowledging it in Cuba would have landed her in prison.

UNACCOMPANIED CHILDREN

The United States should insist that Elian's father and other relatives residing in Cuba, be allowed by Castro to attend U.S. court hearings where they can speak without intimidation about what is best for the boy. If Castro refuses, what additional evidence is necessary to prove that the most important decisions about Elian's life (if he is returned to Cuba) will not be made by his family but by the regime?

Thousands of Cuban parents have made the heart-wrenching decision to send their children unaccompanied to the United States to save them from the horror of growing up under communism.