The conventional wisdom in Washington holds that there are two big obstacles for Cuba becoming a salient political issue in the 2008 presidential campaign. First is the electoral college math. Miami/Dade County is the second-largest metro area in a swing state with 27 electoral votes--10 percent of those needed to elect a president. And if there is a third rail of politics in Miami, it would be the embargo: touch it and die.

The second obstacle, according to conventional wisdom, is the spectre of being soft on Communism. The recent New York Times article profiling John McCain's senior campaign advisor Charlie Black talked about how in the 1980s Black's Political Action Committee "set a new standard for negative advertising with its campaigns against six liberal senators in 1980, portraying them as “baby killers” for their support of abortion rights, cozy with Castro and soft on national defense." Little has changed in the art of negative politics in the intervening twenty years and we can expect the same kind of attacks in the winner-take-all general election.

But time has had an impact on the Cuba issue and the conventional wisdom is seeing some cracks. Specifically, there is an interesting demographic trend that pollsters are calling "the generation gap." Sixty-five percent of Cuban-American residents of Miami/Dade County support dialogue with the regime in Havana, according to the latest Florida International University poll. That's up 10 percent since 2004. Similarly, 64 percent of this same population support an immediate, unilateral return to the pre-2004 embargo rules.

The reason is simple. The more recent waves of Cuban immigrants have a different relationship to the island. Recent immigrants were more likely economic migrants, fleeing the lack of opportunity and taking advantage of the loose, wet-foot, dry-foot asylum policy that effectively means citizenship for anyone who makes it to dry U.S. soil. It was a calculated gamble: they left behind their families to make the treacherous 90 mile sea voyage for the chance of supporting their loved ones back home with hard-currency remittances.

The old generation left more for political reasons. Comprised in large part of the families who supported, Haiti-style, the U.S.-backed dictator Battista, these families saw their businesses and property nationalized, collectivized, in other words, stolen by the Castro revolutionaries. They brought their extended families with them and after fifty years in exile, their ties back home are generally weaker.

But the issue that made the generation gap into something more than an interesting demographic discussion was George Bush's 2004 tightening of the embargo in areas that hurt newer immigrants disproportionately: family travel and remittances. Now children in the United States have to decide which parent's funeral to attend. Their economic survival strategies, based on risking death to come to America to send back remittances, were suddenly defeated. This was a major wedge.

Add to this a new dynamic. Local economic issues are beginning to compete with the anti-Castro orthodoxy and what was once a solid voting bloc is beginning to splinter. Again, the division is between the older generation and the younger. Older Cuban emigres are more economically established, while the younger are more vulnerable. Florida has been one of the epicenters of the housing slump, and with it, young families will be voting their pocketbooks, not their parent's party line.

Of the registered voters surveyed by FIU, 74 percent responded that the Cuba Embargo has worked not very well or not at all; 53 percent want to see agricultural trade with Cuba expanded or kept the same; even 51 percent want the U.S. to extend full diplomatic relations to Cuba.

Those kinds of numbers, combined with the deep economic concerns all Floridians face, seem to argue against the conventional reading of the electoral math. The Cuban-American community is no longer a solid bloc. What remains is the soft-on-communism question. On this issue, there is also room for a change in the terms of the debate.

With 74 percent of Cuban-American voters agreeing with the statement that the embargo has not worked, that is the place to start. The embargo has not worked because it is unilateral and the rest of the world, especially Europe and including Israel, is profiting from trade with Cuba. These nations look at Cuba the way we look at China or Vietnam: an opportunity for using trade and the slow force of popular expectations of rising prosperity as a lever for change rooted in the citizenry of Cuba, not the fantasies of an empowered exile minority.

But the real failure of the embargo is that it helps prop up the Castro regime. Today, Cuba's integration to the rest of the global economy gives it security. Though dependent on the largess of other powers, Cuba has diversified that dependence, with support coming from Venezuela, China and Brazil, supplemented by real trade with Europe and Canada. In that kind of economic environment, the embargo does more for the revolution than against it.

First, the embargo provided a ready-made excuse for Fidel, and now Raul, to explain why the Cuban revolution is underperforming the people's expectations. It's not the fact that they have two generals controlling two-thirds of the hard currency earnings that the economy is in desperate shape, it's the embargo. It's not that their state-owned tourism industry cannot convince European and Canadian holiday-makers to return for a second time, it's the embargo. It's not that the lack of private property eliminates the chance for collateral, the foundation for all modern economies, it's the embargo.

Second, the embargo is the cornerstone of Cuban Nationalism. Every national movement needs an enemy to give it a sense of shared adversity, what sociologists call a "super-ordinate goal." Take the embargo away, and the foundation of the the Castro power base, intense, loyal nationalism born of the conflict with the United States, will gradually erode.

If most Cuban-Americans agree that the embargo has failed, then it should not be too hard to convince them that the embargo is, in fact, shielding the Cuban regime from internal forces that in other societies, would be shaping a new politics.

And if that's the case, then being "cozy with Castro" really means supporting the embargo.

Clearly, the generation gap in Miami-Dade County will change the politics of Cuba policy in the United States. Without the electoral math and the soft-on-communism to protect it, the only question is whether change happens sooner, or later.