Cuba’s ruling Communist Party opens an unprecedented gathering Saturday that will approve term limits and call for trimming the party’s role in government — and might even hint at who will succeed Raúl Castro.

Yet for all that, Cubans say the man on the street is merely shrugging his shoulders over the two-day conference, frustrated that two other key gatherings of the island’s rulers last year fell way short of expectations.

“No one is interested. No one is talking about it,” said Vladimiro Roca, a Havana dissident and son of the late Blas Roca Calderio, one of the founders and heads of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC).

Castro himself this month threw a bucket of ice water on expectations for the conference, declaring that Cuba faces so many problems that “there shouldn’t be a lot of illusions” about the gathering.

Castro called the PCC’s first-ever National Conference to renovate Cuba’s lone political party and line it up solidly behind his ongoing campaign for profound but risky reforms to rescue the Soviet-styled economy.

Article 5 of the national constitution describes it as the “organized vanguard of the Cuban nation, the superior leadership force of the society and state, which organizes and orients the common efforts toward … the construction of socialism and advance toward a communist society.”

A 96-point Conference agenda published in October was discussed in more than 65,000 meetings of the PCC, with about 780,000 by-invitation-only members in a country of 11.2 million people, and the Union of Young Communists.

One item repeats Castro’s call last spring to limit officials to two five-year terms, and is certain to be approved. He became president of the government in 2008 and first secretary of the PCC last year, replacing ailing brother Fidel.

Several other items address the need to develop a new generation of PCC and UJC leaders. Castro is 80 years old and his No. 2 in both the party and the government, Jose Ramon Machado Ventura, is 81.

Still other points call for reduced PCC involvement in the day-to-day affairs of government; more women and blacks in leadership positions; increased tolerance toward gays; and a more “objective” news media.

Arturo Lopez-Levy, a Cuban-born economist at the University of Denver, said he will pay special attention to membership changes in the party’s ruling Political Bureau. Castro’s successor is likely to first appear in the PolitBuro, where only three of the five members are now under the age of 65.

But the conference agenda overall appears to fall far short of the profound changes needed to make Castro’s economic reforms successful, Lopez-Levy added in a telephone interview.

“To maintain the country’s stability and to make the reforms flow faster, there’s a need for political reforms,” he said. “From what I see of the internal (PCC) reforms, it’s not enough.”

A Lopez-Levy column on the Conference that was published in the Web page Infolatam last week was headlined “Tool for change, or obstacle to reforms?”

Few Cubans in fact have any illusions about the conference and its 800-plus delegates, not after a recent a string of heart-breaking disappointments.

Castro, addressing the national legislature in December amid widespread speculation that he would announce an easing of the government’s hated travel restrictions, merely repeated that the issue was under study.