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The concept of human capital is born. This article analyzes how is ruled this human asset in the history. It has a journey since the creation of Israel to high technology organizations the great sport teams and the non-formal organizations, as the Italian mafia and the afrocuban religion (Santeria). It were analyzed some excellence firms in the world and the main management thinking tendencies. The article proposes the university-firm relation, in order to obtain the most effectiveness in the human capital management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the spread of Afro-Cuban religion Santería to the U.S., with a focus on the role of the visa for religious workers or religious visa on this expansion. Topics addressed include an overview of the emigration from Cuba to the U.S. after the Cuba Revolution of 1959, the U.S. immigration policy toward Cuba from 2004 to 2009, and the relationship between religious organizations and politics in Cuba. A brief historical overview of the origins and practice of Santería in Cuba, as well as its internationalization is also included.

This article begins by analyzing the possible interpretations of the Spanish word el monte. In Lydia Cabrera's El monte it is a cosmos or a setting where the spirits are born, where they reside, it is their oikos, their home, precisely where they decide on man's fate, and everything that is necessary to perform magic. In the monte of the herbalists and the santeros, everything that is natural is also supernatural. Through an ecocritical approach to Lydia Cabrera's representation of the monte —work considered to be the santería bible— this article analyzes Cabrera's monte not as a forest primeval or nature untouched but through Cuban environmental history. In other words, through the idea of nature regarded simply like a raw material to be exploited, as well as a history of indifference to the protection of the natural world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Mexico, adherence to santería as a choice of religious belief began to spread in the 1970s, if not earlier, though that was but an incipient diffusion with its epicenter in Mexico City and the surrounding metropolitan area. Over the past twenty years, however, the presence of santería has gained new strength and extended further, together with certain complementary uses and resignifications of its symbolic universe. This essay examines some of the main tendencies in santería's interactions and complementarities with other forms of religiosity, especially in Mexico's capital city, based on ethnographic examples that make it possible to demonstrate that thisreligion has neither eliminated "old ways of understanding" the world, nor generated a "true transformation" of the religious beliefs among new adepts in Mexico. Rather, santería operates from a field of complementarity and therapeutic logics linked to "divine agents". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The present article is a product of a social-anthropological research about the religion know as santeria performed in Catemaco, Veracruz, México in 2008. The principal objective was to explore and to analyze the different ways in which people build their realities the lifestyles, the spaces (domains) and interaction the main symbols and the local traditions, searching for the origin relationship and mixing by specific practices such as witch craft the spiritism, the folk-healing, craft, etc. At last, to discover the use and the ways that the men and women use them inside the region, from the acquisition of transnational images, discourses and ideas that establish on an imaginary way, building a Mexican santeria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Cuba, amongst many Afro-Cuban religions, there is the Palo de Monte religion, also known as Regla Conga. This religious-and-therapeutic, Bantu-influenced practice is now a widespread practice in Bogotá, Colombia, where it recreates certain elements taken from other religious experiences such as the Regla de Ocha and spiritualism. The scenario presented in this essay is based upon ethnographic research and narrative analysis, and it intends to explain how when people experience extreme situations which undermine their ontological certainty, they start to redress the existential order by starting a specific ceremonial path which involves Palo de Monte.The focus is upon a Palo de Monte ceremony which took part in Bogotá, Colombia. The occasion was the visit of a Mexican-Colombian medical doctor who traveled from México City to seek a healing cure to a trabajo (sorcery) which was placed upon her by a former lover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conception of health and illness in Cuban Santeria goes much further than traditional western ideas about them. The etiology of illness finds her cause in aspects that are much more profound, transcending the physical sphere, the visible world of the subject. Being or feeling ill is a product of a variety of situations which may confluence and are beyond organically explications. For the determination of illness the divinatory systems appear as therapeutic technologies which discern the different possible causes of the suffering tormenting the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the origins, diffusion and connections of Reiki's Cuban culture, one of the so-called bioenergetic techniques of Japanese origin which have a relative cultural influence on Havanan population since its introduction in Cuba in the middle nineties of the recently concluded 20th century. From the many observations and interviews performed in field work, it is very interesting the similarity of concepts, practices and principles existing between Reiki's initiation ceremony of the self called Tibetan School of Old Havana Municipality and the ones of two of the most popular African origin religions: santería and Palo Monte. Also, he analyses the meanings shared by the three phases dividing the rites of these practices, -according to the classification of anthropologist Arnold van Gennep-: personal motives, with sacred connotations for some of its participants, and the mysticism-esoteric environment promoted by school's teachers. The author concludes demonstrating how the double function fulfilled by Reiki's initiation ceremony (one psychotherapeutic and the other cultural), is one of the most attractive features to practising members of Reiki with religious beliefs of African roots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]