Al Kamen's In the Loop: HUD chiefs fly to Rio for conference

"We want to make you aware of a number of serious issues in our bilateral relationship that may affect your decision to have your staff participate in this delegation to Cuba," Menendez and Nelson wrote in their March 9 letter.

They cited the case of Agency for International Development subcontractor Alan Gross, who was working in Cuba on a tourist visa and possessed satellite communications equipment, who has been held in a maximum security prison since his arrest Dec. 3.

They also noted the recent death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, "a 42-year-old Cuban dissident [who] died after going on a prolonged hunger strike in protest of his ongoing beatings at the hands of the regime's prison officials." About 200 political prisoners are brutally treated in Cuban prisons, they said.

So "to have visits to Cuba in light of these deaths and human rights abuses sends the wrong signal to the Castro regime," they wrote. If some on "your staff do travel to Cuba," they wrote, "we would urge them to make as a precondition . . . the unfettered access to non-governmental civil society groups and activists in order to gain an understanding of the full spectrum of life in Cuba."

We're told this trip, like previous ones, includes meetings with Catholic Church folks, civil society people, musicians and artists, as well as government officials. There's usually an overnight jaunt to a rural area to see how different things are out in the campo.

Numerous organizations have sponsored bipartisan lawmaker and staff trips to Cuba over the years. (If you're not on this one, the New America Foundation has one going in a few weeks that will be led by former lawmakers.) U.S. citizens, with some exceptions, generally are barred from travel to Cuba -- as opposed to traveling to other repressive states such as North Korea, Iran, Libya, Burma, Sudan, Laos, Saudi Arabia, China or any other country on the planet. There's even a tourism company offering Americans trips to scenic North Korea. Go to http://www.northkorea1on1.com.

Nelson went to Syria in 2006, brushing aside similar Bush White House objections over things such as Syrian political prisoners and its alleged assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri in 2005. He also stopped in to see the Saudis, and he has visited with the Chicom leadership. Menendez has visited Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, deemed "not free" on the Freedom House listings. Unclear whether either has asked his Cuban-American constituents -- who enjoy unlimited travel and are going regularly to visit relatives on the island -- to forgo visiting for the moment.

Research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.