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Sean Penn and Maria Conchita Alonso heated exchange at LAX (VIDEO)

By April MacIntyre Dec 21, 2011, 2:49 GMT

02/27/2011 - Maria Conchita Alonso - 21st Annual Night of 100 Stars Academy Awards Viewing Party - Arrivals - The Beverly Hills Hotel - Beverly Hills, CA, USA © Allen Berezovsky / PR Photos

Actors Sean Penn and Cuban actress Maria Conchita Alonso had a heated exchange at LAX, with Alonso branding Penn a “communist a**hole” after he called her a “pig” in front of a crowd.

The NYPost reports that Alonso drew first blood, as she spotted Penn in an American Airlines lost luggage area Sunday.

Cuban-born Alonso was raised in Venezuela, and says her “heart stopped” when she saw the actor, to whom she’d written a letter last year to say she was “appalled” by his support of Hugo Chavez.

Alonso tells Page Six: “I was very calm. I said, ‘I would like to talk to you.’ He said, ‘I have nothing to say to you . . . You have been saying a lot of things about me in the press.’ I said, ‘How can you defend Chavez?’ ”

The argument escalated from there. Alonso relates: “I said, ‘You are a communist, Sean Penn.’ He said, ‘You are a pig!’ So I said, ‘And you are a communist a**hole! Is it great to live the way you do as a communist?’

“I went back to my mother, and he started yelling at us,” Alonso told us. “I yelled back, ‘Communist [bleep]hole!’ Nearly 60 people were watching, shocked. My mother wanted to clap, but she couldn’t because she was in a wheelchair and she had a small dog in her lap.”

Penn, traveling from Haiti, tells Page Six: “I only knew that a hostile woman was nonsensically berating me. I didn’t realize it was that actress. I think I worked with her once. But she looks really different. She was uninformed and impolite to all the other passengers.”

The actors worked on the 1988 film “Colors,” as lovers on different sides of the gang war in Los Angeles.

Alonso was recorded by Steve Malzberg on Washington, DC, radio station WMAL, saying, “I do apologize for calling Sean Penn an a**hole. He is an intelligent man . . . But if someone calls me a pig, I am not going to turn the other cheek. But I don’t regret calling him a communist.”