Fidel's Children.(World Affairs)(Fidel Castro)

Byline: Joseph Contreras; With Monica Campbell in Mexico City

Cuba's leader has resigned, and the nation's youth are starting to push back.

For years, Fidel Castro has been a living anachronism. A stalwart communist in an age of free markets and democracy, he ruled a Cuba largely cut off from a world prospering through international trade. By the end he was out of touch at home as well, both metaphorically and literally. For 19 months, the ailing 81-year-old leader had stayed out of sight, too sick to venture out, reduced to publishing ponderous "reflections" on the front page of the Cuban Communist Party's organ, Granma. By the time he resigned last week, there was something almost anticlimactic about it. Cubans--including emigres in Miami and elsewhere--have waited so long for a change they barely knew what to make of the abrupt announcement. The streets of Havana remained quiet.

But even before Castro's resignation, things had started to shift under the surface. A new generation of Cubans had started to give voice to their anger and frustration in ways unthinkable just a few years ago. According to some estimates, more than half of Cuba's population are between 15 and 45 years of age, and to them it hardly matters whether Fidel's brother, Raol, is formally chosen as his successor this week, or whether another aging communist gets the nod. Young Cubans are starting to publicly demand that the regime make tangible improvements in their lives. Their wish lists are decidedly apolitical. Instead of pining for democracy, most are focused on things foreign peers take for granted: the freedom to travel abroad, unrestricted Internet access, enough disposable income to buy a cell phone or an iPod. "These young students are asking, 'Why are things banned, why are we not allowed to leave the island?'" notes Miriam Leiva, a dissident who once held a high-level post in the Cuban Foreign Ministry.

Many have fled. An estimated 77,000 Cubans immigrated to the United States during a two-year period ending last September, the largest exodus from the island since the early 1970s. A disproportionate share of those refugees were teenagers or twenty-somethings. "Young people are fed up," says Julia Nonez Pacheco, the wife of Adolfo Fernandez Sainz, a jailed independent journalist whose 32-year-old daughter, Joana, left Cuba last year to join her husband in Miami. "Many are escaping, either by hurling themselves into the sea on rafts or by arranging marriages of convenience with foreigners."

But symptoms of mounting discontent are appearing at home, too. Last November, the rape of a young woman at Santiago University triggered a wave of student protest over appalling living conditions and other longstanding grievances. Students gathered more than 5,000 signatures on a petition demanding greater autonomy from Havana's bureaucracy. Then, in January, students at the prestigious University of Information Sciences met with Ricardo Alarcon, the longtime president of Cuba's rubber-stamp national Parliament. One student boldly told him that last month's legislative elections had been a sham, since all the candidates had come from the ruling party. Another asked Alarcon what he should say to his peers who yearn to go abroad, adding that he himself wanted to visit a monument in Bolivia to revolutionary icon Ernesto (Che) Guevara. The whole exchange was clandestinely filmed and circulated within days, showing a flustered Alarcon unable to respond to the challenges.

Many of the students in this now celebrated tA*te-a-tA*te were the privileged sons ...