Lawyers for the U.S. government and Cuba's telephone company joined forces in a Miami courtroom Tuesday to block an attempt to award Cuban money to relatives of three Florida-based civilian pilots shot down by the Cuban air force.

Attorneys for the relatives complained that the U.S. government was playing the role of Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip -- snatching the football away just as Charlie Brown was about to kick it.

``They don't want us to kick that ball, Aaron Podhurst told U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King, who awarded the relatives $187.6 million in damages after Cuban MiGs shot down two Brothers to the Rescue planes in 1996.

The relatives want to seize the money from U.S. phone company payments due to Havana or Cuban funds in U.S. accounts long frozen under the U.S. embargo against Cuba. King gave all parties 10 days to file more arguments before he makes the final decision.

But the hearing prompted some unusual legal maneuvers in a dispute that features two nations long at odds, Cuba's ETECSA telephone company, eight private U.S. telephone companies and the survivors of the Brothers to the Rescue victims.

Justice Department attorney David Anderson argued that a 1998 law that would have allowed the relatives to seize the frozen funds or telephone payments had been suspended by President Clinton to protect ``national security interests.

Havana has repeatedly threatened to cut off all U.S.-Cuba telephone links if the relatives get the telephone money -- links that Anderson said are good for the U.S. policy of promoting people-to-people contacts with Cuba.

Representing ETECSA, New York lawyer Eric Lieberman argued that since King's $187 million judgment was against the Cuban government and air force, the relatives should not be allowed to seize money due his client, ``a private company that has nothing to do with the Cuban government.

Lawyers for ATT and MCI, two of the eight U.S. phone companies that pay ETECSA for Cuba's side of U.S.-Cuba telephone links, made the same argument but said the Cuban government owned 59 percent of ETECSA.

One MCI attorney also argued that since his firm made its payments to Havana through a bank in Canada, that meant MCI did not have any ``debt to ETECSA that could be awarded to the relatives of the Brothers to the Rescue pilots.

Lawyers for the relatives called that ``a money-laundering arrangement and noted that for years all U.S. licenses to the U.S. phone companies doing business with Cuba have referred to payments ``to the Cuban government.

``Now they come and they say no, not the government, but a separate entity called ETECSA, Podhurst said.

Anderson came under particularly sharp questioning by King as he argued that Cuba's frozen funds could not be seized by the relatives because of international treaties and prior claims by U.S. citizens whose Cuban properties were seized by the Castro government in the early 1960s.

``I just wonder how long we're going to have to wait. Another 40 years? King said, going on to ask: ``And, would the United States have protected the assets of Adolf Hitler from victims of the Holocaust?

Anderson went on to argue that allowing U.S. citizens to seize such foreign funds might also complicate a U.S. president's handling of foreign affairs.

The complications would set in ``when the president decides to normalize relations with countries such as Cuba . . . that's what we're looking at here, Anderson said.

King retorted that ``when the time comes . . . I suppose we'd have to have some promise from that government to stop murdering our citizens.