A multistatic radar set-up is considered in which distributed receive antennas are connected to a Fusion Center (FC) via limited-capacity backhaul links. Similar to cloud radio access networks in communications, the receive antennas quantize the received baseband signal before transmitting it to the FC. The problem of maximizing the detection performance at the FC jointly over the code vector used by the transmitting antenna and over the statistics of the noise introduced by backhaul quantization is investigated. Specifically, adopting the information-theoretic criterion of the Bhattacharyya distance to evaluate the detection performance at the FC and information-theoretic measures of the quantization rate, the problem at hand is addressed via a Block Coordinate Descent (BCD) method coupled with Majorization-Minimization (MM). Numerical results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed joint optimization approach over more conventional solutions that perform separate optimization.