Two facts shaped Cuban life during the 1970s and ’80s, when I visited regularly. The first was lavish aid from the Soviet Union, which allowed Cubans to live reasonably well despite the fact that their government was following economic policies that have been proven failures in every country where they have ever been applied. That aid has now evaporated, meaning that doctors must drive taxis to survive, much medicine is unavailable, and all but the most basic foods are imported and sold only for hard currency, to which most Cubans have no access. In material terms, life in Cuba is palpably worse than it was a quarter-century ago.

The other dominant fact of Cuban life in the bygone era was fear. Social control was tight. No one knew who to trust, and people kept their mouths as closed as their minds were supposed to be.

That level of control is now just as distant a memory as Soviet aid. Dissidents are still stigmatized and persecuted; I wished to visit the valiant blogger Yoani Sanchez, for example, but was warned that if I tried, police agents who watch her home day and night would intercept me, escort me directly to the airport and put me on the next flight out of the country. On the streets of Havana, though, ordinary people feel free to criticize their government in ways that would have been unimaginable a generation ago.

I was astonished at the freedom Cubans seem to feel to criticize their revolutionary icons. At an open-air market, a bookseller asked if I’d like to see some books about Che Guevara. When I asked him if it was true that Guevara had ordered critics of the regime shot without trial, he replied, “He sent 150 people to the firing squad on one night!’’

The same revisionism has reshaped the story of another mythic hero of the Cuban revolution, Camilo Cienfuegos. The official version of his death in 1959 is that he was lost when his small plane crashed into the sea. Every one of the half-dozen Cubans I asked about him, however, said they believed Castro had feared his popularity and ordered him killed. There is no evidence for this theory, but the fact that people dare to express it reflects Cuba’s changing public consciousness.

There has also been a dramatic reversal in official attitudes toward homosexuality. In the 1960s and ’70s gays were persecuted, arrested and herded into detention camps. Today the Ministry of Health distributes posters that say: “Homosexuality is not a crime, homophobia is. Do not insult, degrade or isolate people because of their sexual orientation.

A new age of freedom is not about to dawn over Cuba. When Fidel and Raul Castro die, they will not be replaced by radically different figures. If political and social change begins in people’s minds, though, it has already begun in Cuba.

**Stephen Kinzer is author of “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq.’’