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Patrick Oppmann, a correspondent for CNN and head of the network's office in Havana since 2012, published a personal story on Sunday in his Substack Cuba Reporter about the tragic fate of the North Korean ambassador to Cuba: Jon Yong-jin and his wife were executed for treason after being called back to Pyongyang, according to a report from North Korean state media cited by the journalist.
Oppmann, one of the foreign correspondents with the longest presence on the island since the Revolution, reconstructs the events based on what he witnessed and what he was told by an American diplomat identified only as "Tim."
Everything began at the International School of Havana, a private school in Miramar founded in the 1960s by families of diplomats seeking to escape the Cuban state educational system, where children started their day singing We Will Be Like Che.
It was there that Tim revealed something unexpected to him: "You won't believe who some of the kids are whose parents go to that school."
In the fourth-grade classroom of Tim's son, there were two identical twin girls with long black hair, whose country of origin was simply listed as "Korea."
Given that Cuba did not maintain diplomatic relations with South Korea, the conclusion was obvious: they were the daughters of the North Korean ambassador, whom Oppmann had already seen arriving at the school in a black Mercedes with diplomatic license plate 145001.
Ambassador Jon Yong-jin was affable, spoke English fluently, and came from a prominent family in North Korea.
His wife was the sister of General Jang Song-thaek, the second most powerful man in the Pyongyang regime and mentor to the young dictator Kim Jong-un.
The annual tuition for the twins exceeded $30,000, but money did not seem to be an issue for the ambassador, who had one condition: that there were no South Korean students at the school.
Tim and the ambassador would cross paths at school events, exchanging glances that Oppmann describes as: "You know who I am, I know who you are." Two regimes opposed to Washington, with their children sharing a classroom in Havana.
One day, the twins stopped showing up.
No farewell party, no notice of a new destination. The school tried to contact the North Korean embassy—a mansion in Vedado surrounded by concrete walls and barbed wire—but never received a response.
Weeks later, news arrived of a purge: Kim Jong-un had ordered the execution of his uncle Jang Song-thaek on December 12, 2013, accused of treason, and recalled all diplomats associated with him.
Ambassador Jon Yong-jin and his family were on that list.
Oppmann and Tim were speculating over diplomatic cocktails: "Did he take the trouble to buy a return ticket?"
Tim believed they returned because they knew that their extended family would be eliminated if they didn't, a documented practice of the North Korean regime.
The confirmation arrived in a brief dispatch from the North Korean state agency: the ambassador and his wife had been executed for treason.
No mention of his twin daughters.
The case was not the only dark connection between both dictatorships in Havana.
In November 2023, the high-ranking North Korean diplomat Ri Il-gyu, stationed in Cuba, defected to South Korea and revealed a network of smuggling Cuban cigars purchased at 50 dollars a box and resold for 1,000 dollars using diplomatic pouches.
Cuba and North Korea maintained one of the most enduring communist alliances of the Cold War since they established diplomatic relations in August 1960, based on shared ideology and an anti-American stance.
That exclusivity ended when Cuba opened its embassy in Seoul in June 2025, six decades after ignoring South Korea in the name of socialist solidarity with Pyongyang.
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