The Elian Gonzalez affair put a human face, a little boy’s face, on this country’s 39-year trade embargo against Cuba. The establishment of normal trade relations with China supposedly affirmed that where commerce goes, freedom is sure to follow.

To many in Congress, however, freedom can hitch a ride with commerce across thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean, but not across 90 miles of the Straits of Florida. Not only is legislation to relax the Cuban embargo stalled in Congress, merely talking about it can’t even get a hearing.

Just days after the most recent of several votes to ease restrictions on shipments of American food and medicine to Cuba, the Senate rejected a proposal to set up a commission to study forging closer relations. The commission suggested by Sen. Christopher Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, would have assessed, among other things, whether Cuba poses a military threat to the United States and supports terrorism. If the answer, based upon evidence instead of anecdote, was in the negative, the commission would have made recommendations to improve relations. Sen. Dodd’s proposal to replace fear-mongering with facts was defeated 59-41, largely along party lines.

Senate votes on measures allowing food and medicine shipments to Cuba are safe votes, as the House inevitably defeats them. Republican Congressman George Nethercutt, Jr., of Washington is finding out that this mutual-protection agreement between the Cold Warriors in both chambers works both ways. His bill to allow exports of food and medicine to Cuba may well pass in the House, a safe vote there because Senate leadership already says it will never see the light of day in their venue.

The American Farm Bureau estimates that Nethercutt’s bill would generate $1 billion a year in grain sales, an amount amazingly close to the emergency bailout appropriation Congress is considering for farmers. American farmers and taxpayers would enjoy direct financial benefit, and if the justification for open trade with China applies, so would the Cuban people.

By every measure, China’s human-rights record is far worse than Cuba’s: Beijing still has not accounted for the thousands of dissidents who vanished after the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989; the 18,000 executions it admits to in the 1990s is considered a small fraction of the true total; the crackdown — a mild term for torture, imprisonment and murder — on the Falun Gong spiritual movement are crimes a thousand Fidel Castros could not carry out.

Those in Congress who ushered through permanent trade relations with China swore that every shipment of American goods would contain at least a few crates of freedom, democracy and human rights. Why that would not be the case with Cuba is not explained. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, a cheerleader for China trade, says it is “very easy to see the distinction between trade with China and Cuba.” It’s not, unless the distinction is between China’s 1.2 billion potential consumers and Cuba’s paltry 11.2 million.

It was not necessary to wait until the last Communist in China died before the United States opened normal trade. Odd that the United States’ policy towards Cuba seems based entirely upon Castro’s life expectancy.

Of course, Cuba policy is not set by something as consitutionally suspect as actuarial tables. It’s set by Florida’s Cuban exile community, the same community that turned Elian from a sad and brave little boy into a political pawn.

Florida Sen. Connie Mack is exceedingly sensitive to the views of that community. Only that — or severe sunstroke — can explain his statement that a 12-member commission (six appointed by the president and six by congressional leadership) to merely study the situation in Cuba and make recommendations to the next president “is not the way to set foreign policy.” Better, apparently, to leave it to the unelected exiles who’ve done such a fine job of it for the last 40 years.