Charlie Crist's Cuba Gambit

A decade ago, a declaration by a Florida gubernatorial candidate that he wanted to travel to Cuba would have been political suicide, the kind of self-inflicted wound that ruins careers. Florida houses nearly 1 million Cuban-Americans, many of whom fled Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959 and in the repressive years that followed.

So what are we to make of Charlie Crist’s recent announcement that he might be considering a summer trip to Havana? Crist, a former Republican governor and now a Democrat seeking to oust incumbent Rick Scott, would seem to be deliberately sabotaging his campaign. He’s even making noises about lifting the embargo, long a no-no in Florida politics. So is Crist crazy?

Not really. Thanks to changes on both sides of the Florida Straits, Crist’s plans no longer seem outrageous. In fact, they show just how much the state has changed in the 50-odd years since Castro first took power.

President Barack Obama provided the first clues to the changing politics of Cuba when he won Florida in 2008 without any of the usual pandering to hard-line anti-Castro voters. Florida had, after all, voted Republican in 2004 and was the key to George W. Bush’s election in 2000. In 2012, Obama won the state, albeit barely, despite his decision early in his first term to overturn Bush-era rules that limited the travel of Cuban-Americans to Cuba and placed a ceiling on family remittances to the island....

Read the full article in Politico's online opinion section.