DON BOHNING

 Elián González appears to have helped the U.S. press.

 After opinion polls showed most Americans sided with Fidel Castro's position in
 his fight to reunite the shipwrecked boy with his father, Cuba specialists
 suggested Friday that the American sentiment may have prompted the Castro
 government to permit two more U.S. news organizations to open offices in
 Havana.

 ``I think Cuba is being a little bit more aggressive since Elián in putting its
 viewpoint forward,'' Lisandro Pérez, director of the Cuban Research Institute at
 Florida International University, said Friday.

 He suggested that the move could be part of a larger effort to influence U.S.
 opinion in order to promote Cuba's political agenda. ``Obviously they have taken
 the view that there are some things they would like to see changed,'' said Pérez,
 citing the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act as a target of Castro's criticism. The law
 gives Cubans preference for U.S. residency. Georges Fauriol, director of the
 Americas Program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International
 Studies, agreed.

 ``In a general sense, I think it [the media opening] has something to do with
 Elián,'' said Fauriol, citing the five-month tug of war between Cuba and the Miami
 relatives of the 6-year-old Cuban rafter, who finally returned to Cuba with his father
 in April.

 The Dallas Morning News and the Tribune Co., which includes The Chicago
 Tribune and The Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, will join CNN and The
 Associated Press as the only U.S. news organizations allowed to have
 correspondents based in the Cuban capital.

 From the standpoint of the Cuban government, ``the experiment with CNN and
 other people has worked out,'' Pérez said. Fauriol added that ``the media played
 an important role in the Elián case. The prominence of the issue and the role of
 the media, from their perspective, helped change the overall perception that
 Americans have of the Cuban agenda.''

 Some members of the exile community in Miami consider CNN's coverage biased
 in favor of the Cuban government, however. On the day U.S. agents seized Elián
 González in Little Havana, protesters attacked a CNN crew at the site.

 When CNN opened its Cuba news bureau in March 1997, it became the first U.S.
 news organization with an office in Havana in 28 years.

 CNN and the AP were among 10 U.S. news organizations the Clinton
 administration authorized in February 1997 to open offices in Havana. The Miami
 Herald was among the 10, but the Cuban government has consistently ignored or
 rejected its requests, dating back to the 1980s.

 Doug Clifton, The Herald's executive editor from 1992 until May 1999 and now
 executive editor of The Cleveland Plain Dealer, said Friday that ``there were no
 fewer than three formal applications'' to open a Herald bureau in Havana submitted
 to the Cuban government during the seven years he was The Herald's top news
 executive.

 ``They never denied them; they just ignored them,'' Clifton said Friday in a
 telephone interview.

 Clifton said he ``always felt pretty strongly they would never allow The Herald a
 bureau. All of their actions anytime we ever applied were so strongly opposed to a
 bureau that it was a fantasy.

 ``They said pretty clearly that they viewed The Herald as an enemy of the Castro
 regime and thought our reporting was biased, which I denied and still deny. Our
 editorial position was one they found totally intolerable. Their point of view was
 that we were pandering to the exile community.''

 James O'Shea, the deputy managing editor for news at The Tribune, said the
 Havana office would be a ``Tribune company bureau,'' meaning it would be
 operated in conjunction with the company's other news outlets, including The
 Sun-Sentinel and The Orlando Sentinel.

 This report was supplemented with material from The Associated Press.