WASHINGTON — President Bush, acting 33 years after the final cease-fire was signed ending America’s defense of Vietnam, tomorrow will welcome to the White House the president of communist Vietnam in the first visit by the head of state of America’s former foe.

In many ways the visit by Nguyen Minh Triet will underscore how Vietnam was only one battle in the larger struggle against international communism that was ultimately won by those countries that enshrined free markets and individual liberties. Mr. Triet on Tuesday visited the New York Stock Exchange and remarked, “The financial and securities markets have an increasingly important role to play in the Vietnamese economy with the participation of a large number of both domestic and foreign investors.”

Vietnam, still technically a socialist republic, formally joined in February the World Trade Organization. Yet the legacy of the Vietnam War is certain to play a role in the meeting Friday between the two leaders. This week the Defense Department released to the Hanoi regime the most detailed maps to date showing the whereabouts of stores of Agent Orange, the dioxin-based herbicide American aircraft sprayed on the country’s jungle terrain to remove the cover from under which enemy soldiers attacked America’s GIs.

Residue of Agent Orange remains a point of contention between America and Vietnam, with Hanoi claiming the spray caused cancer in tens of thousands. A member of the 12-person American Vietnamese panel examining the issue, Governor Whitman, a former leader of New Jersey and ex-head of the Environmental Protection Agency, issued a statement yesterday saying, “The time is right for our two countries to come together to address this legacy and to mainstream discussion of this unresolved issue.”

The White House this week announced that Mr. Bush would “express his deep concern over the recent increase of arrests and detentions of peaceful democracy activists in Vietnam, and note that such actions will inevitably limit the growth of bilateral ties.” Supporters of the Vietnam war have long been concerned at the treatment of North Vietnamese citizens by the communist regime and warned that such restrictive governments would spread throughout southeast Asia if the communists were not stopped in their assault on Saigon.

The White House note about human rights follows the arrest in March of Nguyen Van Dai, a lawyer and the founder of the Committee for Human Rights in Vietnam. In February Vietnamese authorities arrested a Catholic priest, Father Nguyen Van Ly, who was the founder of a democracy movement in 2006 known as Block 8406.

Those arrests and others prompted Human Rights Watch’s deputy Asia director, Sophie Richardson, to issue a statement saying: “Vietnam has now taken its place on the world economic stage, but its human rights record lags far behind . . . the government’s ongoing criminalization of peaceful political dissent and violations of basic human rights threatens to undermine its economic achievements.”

America and Vietnam formally resumed diplomatic ties in 1995. Both President Clinton and Mr. Bush have paid official visits to the Hanoi.