Apart from publicly known dissidents, nearly all Cubans who are critical of their country and the Castro regime that has ruled it for 49 years hide behind a cloak of anonymity. Not so with Yoani Sanchez: the Generacion Y blog she launched last April displays her name and photo, even though the 32-year-old mother of one pulls no punches in her portrayals of a decrepit and venal Communist system that has failed young Cubans. Perhaps most surprising of all, Sanchez has yet to run afoul of the authorities despite recent profiles that appeared in The Wall Street Journal and on CNN en Espanol. When Fidel Castro was fully in charge, professional independent journalists were routinely thrown into jail for even mildly negative coverage of conditions on the island. But since Fidel fell ill in the summer of 2006 and transferred power to his brother Raul, Cubans have been urged to "debate fearlessly"and come forward with solutions to the many "systemic" problems like rampant corruption and inadequate public transportation plaguing their country. The apparent decision to tolerate Sanchez and her unsparing critique of what she calls "Stalinism with conga drums" is viewed by some analysts as more evidence of a loosening of the leash under the younger Castro.

By all accounts, more Cubans are starting to pipe up in ways that would have seemed inconceivable two years ago. The Miami Herald recently reported that several youths were detained in November for protesting one-party municipal elections they rejected as a sham exercise, and a group of rural women subsequently submitted a petition to the country's rubber-stamp national assembly calling for an end to Cuba's dual currency system that operates with drastically devalued standard pesos and "convertible" pesos worth more than the U.S. dollar. Yoani Sanchez has written about food shortages at her 12-year-old son's school and the crumbling state of many residential buildings in Havana. She has even bluntly questioned the relevance of Fidel Castro's frequent newspaper columns about international politics and global warming for a population "that is tired, disenchanted and in need today of measures that alleviate its precariousness."

But I have my doubts about all this. Some of us who covered Jimmy Carter's historic visit to Cuba in May 2002 believed we were witnessing the dawn of a new era. The former U.S. president openly met with leading dissidents during his stay and delivered a speech at the University of Havana that was broadcast live and unedited on Cuban state-run television even though Carter was at times quite critical of his bearded host sitting in the front row of the audience. But that false dawn was fully exposed ten months later when Fidel's security forces jailed 75 human rights activists, independent librarians and journalists on the eve of George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, at a time when the world's attention was understandably distracted from events unfolding on a Caribbean island.

For all the talk about inviting new ideas and encouraging robust discussion of the challenges facing a post-Fidel Cuba, Raul Castro has yet to implement any concrete economic or political reform. Though he hasn't been seen in public now for 18 months, Fidel continues to function as a kind of emergency brake on whatever plans Raul may have for opening up the economy to more private investment and initiative. And it seems that Raul can't quite bring himself to release that brake as long as his sibling is still alive, however barely. A key test will come later this winter when the newly elected national assembly convenes to choose from among its members a new Council of State, which ranks as the country's supreme decision-making body. Fidel has long served as the council's president, and if he is left off the body and gently pushed into retirement Raul may finally feel at liberty to shake up a system that long ago ceased to inspire younger Cubans who have never known anything other than Communist rule. If, however, Fidel is re-elected to the presidency of the council for the umpteenth time, expect more of the same-old-same-old in the Western Hemisphere's only remaining dictatorship. Either way, Yoani Sanchez will be weighing in with her take on what's happening on the island--provided of course all the recent publicity about the Generacion Y blog doesn't get her hustled off to one of the Castros' gulags before then.