BloombergBusinessweek May 4, 2020
Hedidn’tgrowuprich,buthisfamilywasoncepowerful,
he says. An ancestor conquered land on the French border
and claimed it for the Spanish king, who rewarded him with
the title of Barón de Les. Cao de Benós, as the eldest male
heir, has claim to this title, as well as Marqués de Rosalmonte,
Conde de Argelejo, and Marqués de Diezma y la Hinojosa.
Today, the titles carry no privileges. All the wealth is gone,
too, because his paternal grandfather blew the fortune on poor
investments and gambling. Cao de Benós could claim the hon-
orifics, but he’d have to ask the king’s permission and pay a fee.
His father was a chemist who married and raised his son in
a happy, middle-class home. After high school, Cao de Benós
served three years as an MP in Spain’s air force, but the whole
time his heart was in North Korea.
He has only honorary citizenship in the country, he says. To
become a North Korean citizen, Cao de Benós would have to
renounce Spain, which would mean giving up a free life on the
Spanish coast and moving to the world’s most closed-off coun-
try. This isn’t a dealbreaker for him. “It’s what I wanted since
I’m 13,” he says, over a plate of vegetable paella (Cao de Benós
is vegetarian) in Tarragona’s old quarter, during one of three
days’ worth of conversations in which he rhapsodizes about
the famously brutal and authoritarian regime. That’s when he
read about North Korea’s particular—in his view, pure—form
of socialism and fell in love. At 16, he flew to Pyongyang, hav-
ing saved up for the flight by working at a gas station. “I found
a very clean society with very nice people,” he recalls. “And
then, I made up my mind: I want to help Korea.”
His first step was to found the Korean Friendship
Association, or KFA. Cao de Benós persuaded high school pals
to join, not out of a shared affinity for socialism, but because
he offered Coca-Cola and karaoke at meetings. His father
didn’t approve. “He wanted to push me out of home, because
he worried something will happen to the family because of
my work,” Cao de Benós says. “I had a tough time.” It was a
tough time to be an aspiring socialist, period. This was the
early 1990s, when Eastern Europe was falling. “I was the only
one going against direction,” he says.
In 2000, Cao de Benós created North Korea’s first official
website, korea-dpr.com, despite knowing just rudimentary
web design, he says. This was the country’s only outwardly
facing government site in English, he adds, until it started
its own in 2012, meaning that any Westerner who tried to
contact North Korea online from 2000 to 2012 was writing
to one guy in Spain.
Hundreds of thousands of people visited the primitive“I will sacrifice myself in the capitalist jungle and fight my way”