Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, Doctor RJ, Magnifico, annetteboardman and Man Oh Man. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) wader, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke and jlms qkw.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Special thanks to JekylinHyde for the OND banner.
HOW A GOP HARDLINER ON CUBA CHANGED SIDES AND WHAT IT COST HIM
McClatchy DC
On a steamy summer day one year ago, standing on a dusty Havana back-road, Carlos Gutierrez was somehow able to find the childhood home he’d last seen more than a half century earlier, before he and his family fled Fidel Castro’s communist revolution.
It’s a blood bank now, but he walked down the street, rounded a curve and recognized it right away: No. 26, a simple one-story house.
More remarkable still was Gutierrez’s presence there at all, helping to lead a high-level American delegation to mark the reopening of the U.S. Embassy in Havana.
For Gutierrez, the most fascinating journey of all has been an internal one, an intellectual and emotional excursion that has carried him from his role as an anti-Castro hardliner in Republican George W. Bush’s Cabinet to his new role as a champion of American business investment in his homeland.
Gutierrez gives numerous reasons for his policy shift, ranging from having left Miami as a child to his family’s time in Mexico and his later work in China.