iCloud, Google and local Mac contacts

I have recently returned to the world of iPhone from Android and I presently now have 2 macs, an iPad and an iPhone. I am a GMail user and up until now, GMail contacts has been my point of reference for contacts and I simply sync'd local contacts with my GMail contacts. Now that I made the move, I noticed that some of my contact information went missing once I moved from Android, which is not surprising because with all the places Android syncs contacts from, it was impossible to know where information was going to. As it turned out, most of the contact information I had had been getting synced up to iCloud thanks to one of my Macs having iCloud as a data source for its Address book. Still, how everything syncs up is pretty nebulous. I am not seeing that changes that I make on my mac get synced up with GMail contacts, probably because new contacts are going to iCloud instead. It is not at all clear how things are happening behind the scenes, but Apple does a much better job at keeping my address book tidy.

So the question I have is what actually syncs up with iCloud and how? Is it just my local contacts on my mac? I ask because it would seem that somehowm and I am not sure if it is because my contacts on my iPad managed to indirectly sync up my gmail contacts with iCloud, but I did get some syncing going on somehow. Is there a way to have this happen on the mac?

Ultimately, all I want is to have my GMail contacts, my iCloud contacts and my local mac contacts to all be in sync. The syncing between the local mac contacts and GMail contacts seems obvious enough, but it is unclear how and if my local contacts sync with iCloud at all.

Second, when I make a new contact, can I countrol what adress book it goes into?

I guess what I am looking for is a sane strategy to keep all my contacts in sync. This woud seem a hard thing to actually acomplish. The missing or at least obsure link would seem to be between iCloud and the local mac contacts. The goal would be that any additions or edits to the contacts of any of my 4 apple devices and GMail contacts would be synced thorughout.

Anybody out there deal with this and have a strategy that works for them?