“It was the moment so many of us had waited for,” Martinez said. “There were people who were not political, not intellectuals. The marginalized. People from different social classes. Everyone, just desperate, just fed up, standing together and screaming for freedom. Because the people are hungry, and they have lost their fear.”... In seeing the images of fearless masses overturning police cars and standing defiant in the face of official force, dissidents in Cuba and the exile community in South Florida embraced a historic moment they had long sought. But analysts say Cuba’s powerful intelligence and security apparatus — which has not only successfully enforced a police state at home for six decades but helped support allied regimes in Venezuela, Nicaragua and beyond — will probably prevent the protests from spiraling rapidly into a Caribbean version of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet even if authorities can quell the current unrest, the breadth of the protests suggests the most significant threat to the government since the collapse of the Soviet Union — and one that could grow. The new generation of Cuban leaders, meanwhile, is meeting the test without the experience or mystique of the Castros. Fidel, the father of the communist state, is now five years dead. His brother Raúl, 90, has gone into retirement.