In a world where Americans learn intimate details about religious upheavals in Afghanistan and follow the smallest gyrations in Japanese stock markets, Cuba, ninety miles off Florida, remains a relative mystery.
 Is Castro's economy improving or declining? What kind of education and medical care do Cuban children get? How has this clever dictator managed to last through the terms of eight U.S. presidents,

 all eager to depose him?

 Maybe we'll soon have some answers to these questions from the American media. About the time you read this, CNN plans to open the first U.S. news bureau in Cuba since 1969, when The Associated Press was kicked out. It intends to station five journalists, led by senior Latin American correspondent Lucia Newman, on the island, where coverage by U.S. organizations had previously been provided by stringers who were sporadically admitted - and sporadically booted out - by Castro's jumpy bureaucrats. Now that CNN has gained a foothold on this unforgiving island, other newspapers and networks are hoping to follow. Ten U.S. media organizations - including The Miami Herald, the Chicago Tribune, CBS, and ABC - received permission for a Cuba bureau from the Clinton administration in mid-February, but so far only CNN has the green light from the Cubans.

 Castro's approval was "a huge breakthrough," says Eason Jordan, CNN International's executive vice president. After a long campaign, the network got authorization from Cuba back in August, but didn't publicize it until November in order to prevent the issue from being "politicized" before the U.S. election.

 Washington was the next hurdle. CNN waited for months for a word from the Treasury Department, which must license any U.S. news organization that wants to set up a bureau in Cuba. At issue was the Helms-Burton law, fathered by Jesse Helms, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Representative Dan Burton, and officially known as the "Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (LIBERTAD) Act of 1996." Signed by President Clinton in March, 1996, in the turbulent wake of Cuba's downing of two American airplanes, the law strengthens the thirty-five-year-old U.S. embargo against the island.

 Section 114 of the law establishes conditions for an exchange of news bureaus, which are allowed with certain - some would say prohibitive - conditions. The law stipulates, for example, that the Cuban government cannot interfere with the functioning in Cuba of any U.S.-based organizations, including the U.S.-sponsored Radio Mart' and Television Mart', both of which are abhorred by the Cuban government for their firmly anti-Castro line. The Treasury Department did not authorize the opening of a Cuban news bureau in the U.S.

 Some other news organizations were less than pleased with the idea of a CNN monopoly. And a serious concern, said a State Department official, was whether the U.S. should be in the position of letting Cubans pick and choose the media they like.

The Miami Herald is one paper that has been eager to get into Cuba, and has not been shy with Cuban officials about its intentions. "They certainly know we're interested," says publisher David Lawrence Jr., who has personally lobbied in both Washington and Havana for permission to operate on the island. The Herald reported in January that within days of learning that Cuba was opening its doors to CNN, Lawrence "sent a flurry of letters to senior U.S. officials asking that the Herald be included in 'the first wave of any arrangement that involves news bureaus in Cuba.'" Later Lawrence declared that he doesn't mind CNN's opening a bureau, but "we think that the Herald, with its decades of coverage of Cuba and the fact that 55 percent of all Cuban-Americans live in South Florida, ought to be there early. Immediately, if possible."

 CNN does have an advantage: its founder has a special kind of relationship with Cuba. Some critics point out that CNN boss Ted Turner and Castro aren't just business associates, they're pals. "They've gone fishing together," says Gil Kapen, a staff member with the House International Relations Committee. Kapen says he has some concerns about the network's ability to be unbiased in covering the charismatic Castro. And Mariela Ferretti, spokeswoman for the anti-Castro Cuban American National Foundation, based in Miami, says that Castro's approval of CNN's entry is a positive step, but thinks precedent doesn't bode well for objective reporting from the island: she believes CNN's pre-bureau coverage of Cuba "stinks."

 CNN's Jordan finds such worries "outrageous." He says Castro has promised CNN unconditional access, and that the network - with twenty-one international bureaus from Nairobi to Jakarta and a reach into 180 million homes worldwide - will uphold its high journalistic standards. "We'll be fair, we'll be balanced," says CNN anchor Bernard Shaw. "We don't hold up a finger to see which way the wind is blowing."

 CNN maintains that its entry paves the way for a more open Cuba. Indeed, many organizations are eager to establish Cuba bureaus. Some, like The Washington Post, applied to the Cuban government but haven't bothered asking the U.S. for access - after all, they say, Clinton's approval is moot without Castro's. Not a few journalists, it should be noted, are uncomfortable with the very idea of a free press's having to ask U.S. authorities for permission.

 Fort Lauderdale's Sun-Sentinel, which now has U.S. approval, is also hoping to open a bureau. "If you're going to have a true sense of what's going on in Cuba, you have to have continuity," says editor Earl Maucker. He supports CNN's entry, and sees Castro's go-ahead for it as a warm breath in a general thawing trend toward the press in Cuba. He adds, "It's got to start some place."

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