Charlie Crist's flip-flop on Cuba mirrors larger trend | Video

Less than a generation ago, calling for the end of the trade embargo against Cuba would have been unthinkable the equivalent of stepping on a political land mine.

The political reality in 2014 is much more complicated.

The landscape of Florida politics and the Cuban-American community have changed so much and so fast that Charlie Crist's new position on the 53-year-old embargo seized on by his opponents of evidence of his "ignorance" and willingness to "insult" the state's Cuban-Americans may not end up damaging his comeback campaign for governor and, some suggest, might even turn into a modest advantage.

"Clearly the Cuban embargo I don't think is an issue that moves the masses," said Juan Carlos Arias, 42, born in the U.S. to a family that fled Fidel Castro's Cuba between 1961 and 1968. "Without a doubt, some of the opinions, the hard-line opinions, the classic, the traditional opinions have shifted."

Arias, a Plantation lawyer and no party-affiliation/independent voter involved in several civic organizations, is a strong proponent of maintaining the embargo. But there are plenty of people in the Cuban community who feel differently, and Arias said his view is no longer the majority opinion.

Public opinion polling released recently found 63 percent of Floridians support normalizing relations or engaging more directly with the Cuban government, with 30 percent opposed. The bipartisan polling team of Republican Glen Bolger and Democrat Paul Maslin found broad support across the political spectrum, including in South Florida and the Cuban-American community.

Changing sentiment may have emboldened Crist when he was asked about the embargo in a Feb. 7 interview on the HBO show "Real Time with Bill Maher." Not long ago, "it is not something that you'd even speak of. You might think it, but you would never say it, said Isidro Raul Mejia, president of the Palm Beach County Democratic Hispanic Caucus.

Factors that may help Crist benefit:

Attitudes are changing in the Cuban-American community, especially among young Cuban-Americans born in the U.S. They're not as automatically Republican as their anti-Castro parents and grandparents.

"You've had a lot of second- and even third-generation people who are coming of age and in their 20s and 30s. They just don't think in terms of that sort of island politics," said Kevin Hill, a Florida International University political science professor who has researched attitudes of Cuban-Americans toward politics and the island nation. "The people who feel very strongly about it are either hard-core right-wingers or they're 85-years-old."

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Charlie Crist's flip-flop on Cuba mirrors larger trend | Video