By Karen DeYoung and Eric Pianin
                  Washington Post Staff Writers

                  Republican leaders are working overtime this week to persuade Congress
                  to normalize trade relations with China's communist government. Since
                  American goods come with American values, said House Majority Whip
                  Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), free trade means "spreading freedom all over
                  China."

                  Less publicly, but with almost as much zeal, those same leaders are also
                  working this week to block a measure allowing minimal trade with Cuba's
                  communist government.

                  "It's very easy to see the distinction" between the two cases, Senate
                  Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) told reporters yesterday. "And if
                  you all can't see it, I don't know. Maybe you're just blind to it."

                  But it's a distinction that has eluded an increasing number of congressional
                  Republicans, some of whom have dug in their heels to demand the
                  leadership allow a long-avoided vote on a partial lifting of economic
                  sanctions against Cuba.

                  As the United States has expanded trade and diplomatic relationships with
                  China and Vietnam, and extended carrots toward North Korea, policy
                  toward Cuba has remained in a class by itself, exempt from the usual
                  arguments of globalization, strategic nudging and commercial competition.

                  For most of the four decades since sanctions were first put in place, those
                  who advocated "spreading freedom" via engagement and trade with
                  Cuba--primarily Democrats of the leftist persuasion--made little headway
                  against the arguments of anti-communism. The Clinton administration's
                  early efforts toward normal relations with Havana stopped abruptly in
                  1996, when the Cuban government shot down two civilian aircraft being
                  flown by anti-Castro activists in international airspace.

                  But now, when even those of the rightist persuasion argue for engagement
                  with the world's reigning communist behemoth in Beijing, the reasons for
                  continuing isolation of Havana are being challenged as never before.

                  "If you think China is more likely to change politically if it's brought into
                  global economic relations, then why not apply the same logic to Cuba?"
                  said Thomas Mann, a government affairs expert with the Brookings
                  Institution. "The politics are different. It's Cuba's proximity. It's the
                  presence of Cuban Americans in the States. . . . It's the fact that a
                  comparable sort of business lobby has not developed for Cuba as is
                  clearly present for China."

                  And, as Lott pointed out, it's Fidel Castro. "Castro has shown no
                  repentance," Lott said. "He is running a dictatorship, a repressive
                  dictatorship." Cuba, said Lott, during the week of upbeat assessments of
                  China, "is the only remaining communist country in the world except for
                  North Korea."

                  With diminished state control and increased tolerance of private
                  entrepreneurship, China has begun to open its economy in ways that are
                  still anathema in Cuba's tightly controlled system. Yet in terms of personal
                  and political freedoms, the State Department's descriptions of the two
                  countries are remarkably similar.

                  "The People's Republic of China is an authoritarian state in which the
                  Chinese Communist Party is the paramount source of power," said the
                  department's human rights report released last February. "Citizens lack
                  both the freedom peacefully to express opposition to the Party-led political
                  system and the right to change their national leaders or form of
                  government. . . . Prison conditions at most facilities remained harsh."

                  "Cuba," this year's report said, "is a totalitarian state controlled by
                  President Fidel Castro, who is Chief of State, Head of Government, First
                  Secretary of the Communist Party and commander in chief of its armed
                  forces. . . . Citizens do not have the right to change their government
                  peacefully. . . . Prison conditions remained harsh."

                  Robert R. Neal, an aide to Rep. George R. Nethercutt (R-Wash.), the
                  sponsor of a measure to lift the U.S. trade embargo on food and medicine
                  sales to Cuba, said the GOP leadership is in an interesting spot: "You
                  further democratic interests in China by trading with them. On the other
                  hand, you embolden the communist leadership in Cuba by trading with
                  them."

                  This is the third year in a row Nethercutt, a conservative who serves on the
                  House Appropriations agriculture subcommittee, has proposed lifting
                  unilateral sanctions on shipments of food and medicine on Cuba and other
                  countries. But it's the first time he has come so close to succeeding--thanks
                  to an expanding coalition of market-seeking farm-state Republicans and
                  liberal Democrats that passed a similar measure in the Senate last year and
                  again last month.

                  Last year, Nethercutt's measure went down to defeat, 28 to 24, in the full
                  Appropriations Committee. This year, despite extensive lobbying against it
                  by DeLay, it passed 35 to 24. Now the House leadership, eager to pass
                  the agricultural appropriations bill to which it is attached, is searching for
                  ways to strip it out.

                  The easiest way is for the Rules Committee--where Cuban American Rep.
                  Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) usually has his way on anything related to
                  Cuba--to subject it to a parliamentary motion that would make it easy to
                  kill it on the House floor.

                  But Nethercutt and his supporters believe they have enough Republicans
                  willing to join with Democrats to send the bill back to committee if the
                  Rules Committee tries to do that. That would delay passage of an overall
                  appropriations bill the leadership wants to see passed before the Memorial
                  Day recess begins at the end of this week.

                  As of last night, negotiations were continuing with the committee.

                  "I need to stand up for the farmers in my district," Nethercutt said, citing
                  those who want to sell peas and lentils to Cuba as well as those seeking to
                  recapture wheat sales lost when sanctions were imposed on Iran.