Monday, August 31, 1998; Page B06

Nereida Leon Mujal, 84, a retired D.C. government official and a native of Cuba, died Aug. 26 at the Mediplex nursing rehabilitation facility in Gaithersburg. She had pulmonary edema and a heart ailment.

She came to this country and settled in the Washington area in 1959 and gained her American medical license. She served a surgical residency at Doctors Hospital in Washington and a residency in anesthesiology at Georgetown University Hospital.

In the 1960s, Dr. Mujal served on the staffs of the Washington Hospital Center and the Veterans Hospital in Glenn Dale. In the 1970s, she joined the D.C. government, becoming director of the department of sexually transmitted diseases with the Upshur Street Clinic. She did volunteer work with organizations such as the city's Latino affairs office.

After retiring from the D.C. government in 1985, she continued to practice family medicine in the District. She retired from her private practice in January.

She was a member of the American Geriatrics Society, the American Heart Association and the Cuban Medical Association in Exile.

Dr. Mujal, a 1941 graduate of the University of Havana medical school, served an obstetrics residency at a Havana hospital and did malaria research early in her career. She was a hospital gynecologist, a cancer hospital official and a gynecology professor at the University of Havana before leaving Cuba.

She also took in two infant nieces whom she raised, Dolores Ven Drell de Silver of Winchester, Mass., and Margarita Jovanovic of Delray Beach, Fla.

Dr. Mujal's husband, Eusebio Mujal Barniol, a former secretary-general of the Cuban Confederation of Workers, died in 1985. Survivors include three children, Eusebio Mujal-Leon of Washington, Carlos Mujal of Soquel, Calif., and Nereida C. Mujal of Madrid; and eight grandchildren.