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Paper short abstract

This paper presents an arts-based speculative ethnography of a Cuba governed by prediction markets. The project stages encounters between algorithmic forecasting and Afro-Cuban divination, examining how hybrid epistemic practices reshape authority and expertise in governing uncertain futures.

Paper long abstract

Oracle Index is an arts-based research project exploring how futures are produced, interpreted, and contested in a speculative near-future Cuba governed through cryptocurrency-based prediction markets. Developed in collaboration with Cuban media artist Néstor Siré as part of a research project on cryptocurrencies and informal economies, the project builds on years of ethnographic research on Cuba’s informal digital infrastructures. It proceeds through extrapolation from these realities, extending existing trajectories such as the rise of prediction platforms like Polymarket, Cubans’ use of cryptocurrencies for everyday survival, and the geopolitical pressures shaping the island’s economy.

In our scenario the Cuban state—facing a renewed total U.S. embargo—adopts futarchy, a governance model in which governments define political goals while prediction markets determine which policies are most likely to achieve them. This allows the state to attract foreign crypto investment and channel it into the national economy while maintaining political control. Because these markets are restricted to foreign investors, however, Cubans, the population most affected by the embargo, are excluded and generates parallel betting cultures, repurposing state prediction data as the numerical basis for La Bolita, the island’s historic underground lottery or engaging Santería divination practices.

Oracle Index treats speculative narrative as a method for STS inquiry. The project assembles a hybrid epistemic object, part ethnography, part speculative design, part installation, that functions as a politico-aesthetic device staging encounters between algorithmic prediction markets and vernacular divination. Through this hybrid object, it examines how expertise, evidence, and authority are redistributed when societies begin to govern through probabilities.