HAVANA — For months, Cubans have been treated to an uncharacteristically blunt assessment of their future by none other than their president, Raúl Castro.

They do not work hard enough and live too much off the state dole, he has said. The economy has been based on an unworkable math in which two plus two “equals six or eight,” as he put it in a speech on Saturday. And the leadership has failed to groom a young generation to take over, leaving the upper echelon of the party dominated by standard-bearers of the revolution who are as old as 87.

No longer, he has promised, pushing forward a battery of changes, vastly expanding small businesses and, for the first time since the 1959 revolution, allowing Cubans to buy and sell private homes, something now done only through a bustling underground market.

But if winds of change — and it remains to be seen if they will end up being breezes or gusts — are emanating from the convention hall where the Communist Party held its sixth congress over the last three days, Cubans seem ambivalent, even skeptical, that the end result will upend the island.

“We have a way of making changes but keeping everything the same,” said Johan Rodríguez, 22, who supplements his meager state accountant salary by selling trinkets on the street. “The basic problem is we have no money. I am hoping what they are discussing will change that.”

Mr. Castro has steadfastly avoided using anything like the word capitalism in discussing the new economic platform, lest the United States get the impression a long-lost cousin was coming into the fold. Indeed, he has tended to avoid describing the changes as, well, changes, preferring to cast them as “modernizing” the Socialist model here.

Still, he has proved adept at diagnosing the precarious condition of the economy, warning that Cuba can no longer afford state workers who do little for their checks and even suggesting eventually doing away with the ration books that provide food and other necessities at heavily subsidized prices.

“How will we afford food?” said another young Cuban, a 36-year-old engineer who did not want his name used for fear his remarks would sound too critical to the government. “They will have to lower food prices a lot so people do not starve. This all seems so much so fast.”

Still, Mr. Castro has not been the radical reformer his speeches suggest he might be. He recently stepped back from announced plans to lay off 500,000 state workers, postponing the cuts indefinitely. Last year, he had cast the state’s “inflated work force” as an unsustainable expense, “tantamount to eating up our future and jeopardizing the very survival of the Revolution.”

But instead of the rapid economic overhaul previously laid out by the Communist leadership, Mr. Castro said much of the changes anticipated would come over the next five years.

And although he suggested top leaders like himself serve no more than two consecutive five-year terms, he also complained that the younger generation was ill prepared to take on top jobs.

How, analysts wondered, should that be interpreted as he officially ascends to the top spot in the party — Fidel Castro, 84, disclosed last month that he was no longer the party chief — and selects a new No. 2 at the party, the person who could succeed him as the nation’s president?

Rafael Hernández, a political scientist who edits the magazine Temas here, says there are legions of young party members in the bottom ranks who often hit a wall as they ascend.

“It is about a difficult political change between the generation that has been there for 50 years and the young generation,” he said. “It’s a difficult process and one that they have wanted to be done deliberately gradually so it would not be so traumatic.

“But,” he added, “I think it is not just about more young people. It’s about young people who think differently. We can have young people who think like the old ones or we can have young people who are young and think differently.”

Reading the tobacco leaves, as some call the Kremlinology here, can prove foolhardy since presumed rising stars streak and fizzle out. It is mostly a matter of matching relatively youthful ages with party rank and the frequency of television appearances, particularly near the Castros.

Much of the attention is on Marino Murillo, 50, who defended President Castro’s initiatives when he was the economy minister. Now he holds a new post as a kind of czar overseeing changes designed to push more people into private enterprise.