I love to watch old movies and I love to read memoirs and biographies. My favorite actress is Maureen O'Hara. She was born in Ireland in 1920 and died at age 95 in 2015 at her grandson's home in Boise, Idaho. In 2004 she wrote "'Tis Myself" and it very beautifully chronicles her amazing life AS A HOLLYWOOD SUPERSTAR. I just finished it and, I swear, I never expected her to write a single word about CUBA. But, to my surprise, she educated me about CUBA, THE CIA, FIDEL CASTRO AND PARTICULARLY CHE GUEVARA!!
After two horrible marriages and a fling with Mexican millionaire Enrique Parra, Maureen O'Hara on March 2nd, 1968 married Charles F. Blair who was 11 years older than the then 48-year-old Maureen but he turned out to be the love of her life. They are shown above when he was a pilot for Pan Am but he was already a world-famed, record-holding pilot for the Air Force and had been honored as a Brigadier General with rare tributes and medals by President Harry Truman. After leaving Pan Am and marrying Maureen, Blair started his own airline with 14 seaplanes based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He and Maureen had a home on St. Croix island and she helped him run the airline as well as a popular Caribbean magazine that she published, far away from her fame as a Hollywood superstar, just as Charlie wanted. Maureen, madly in love with Charlie, wondered why all of his pilots were military men. Then she found papers that proved his superb seaplanes were provided by the CIA and she surmised that the CIA created the airline in the Caribbean to spy on Fidel Castro's Cuba, the same CIA that had, for years, been aligned with Mafia figures and Cuban exiles in fervent attempts to assassinate Fidel. As the head of the successful airline and often as a pilot himself, Charlie in 1978 was flying one of his Grumman Goose seaplanes between St. Croix and St. Thomas when an engine blew and he was killed. Maureen, who had been married to Charlie for almost 11 years, began getting strange calls asking such things as, "Who assassinated Charlie?" Already aware of his CIA connections, she began to wonder...did Charlie know too much about something? She discovered that the engine that blew had just been reworked in Puerto Rico and she learned that the pilot who was to take the ill-fated flight backed out at the last minute, forcing Charlie to fly it and its ten passengers. She would wonder the rest of her long life if indeed he had been assassinated at age 69 by...somebody. When Maureen O'Hara died at age 95 in 2015, she was buried beside Charlie at Arlington National Cemetery in northern Virginia.
But hey!! Long before she married Charlie Blair in 1968, Maureen O'Hara had intimate knowledge of Havana, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. In April of 1959 -- a mere three months after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution -- she went to Cuba to co-star with Alex Guinness in "Our Man in Havana." The photo above shows Maureen in a scene from that movie, which is still on cable movie channels. She was 38-years-old and had been a Hollywood superstar since the great British actor Charles Laughton brought the 18-year-old, red-headed, green-eyed beauty from Ireland in 1939 to the U. S. to co-star with him in the classic movie "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." In April of 1959 when Maureen arrived in Havana, Fidel Castro and his revolutionary soulmate Celia Sanchez were in the U. S. on a 12-day mission trying to make friends with the Eisenhower administration. But Vice-President Richard Nixon and other Washington thugs scuttled those sincere efforts and thus Fidel and Celia returned to Cuba in a defensive mode, with Celia famously declaring, "The Batistianos will never regain control of Cuba as long as I live or as long as Fidel lives." Celia Sanchez well knew that the transplanted Batistianos in the United States were still powerfully supported by the superpower United States government, but history proves she lived up to her vow. Meanwhile, while filming "Our Man in Havana" beginning in April of 1959 Hollywood superstar Maureen O'Hara got to know Fidel and Che real well...intimately, some say. {Yes, you need to read Maureen's book}.
But rumors aside, there is ample photographic and other historic documentation that Maureen O'Hara and most of Hollywood's elite, both male and female, were utterly fascinated and/or infatuated with the internationally famed rebel hero Fidel Castro. Also, it is well known that Fidel himself had a special fascination...some say fetish...with redheads -- including Hollywood superstars such as Maureen O'Hara, Rita Hayworth, etc., as well as Dalia Soto Del Valle, his wife from 1980 till the day he died on Nov. 25, 2016.
A plethora of photos like this seem to indicate that Fidel Castro's infatuation with Maureen O'Hara, and her infatuation with him, was rather well known in Havana and in Hollywood beginning in 1959. Yet, I accept Maureen's explanation when she firmly stated that she was only intrigued with the guerrilla legend who had just led a supposedly over-matched band of rebels to victory over the combined might of a powerful dictator who was supported by the Mafia, the strongest criminal organization in the world, and by the United States, the world's strongest superpower. BUT GUESS WHAT? In her book Maureen O'Hara makes no denial of her infatuation with and love of CHE GUEVARA, which ties in tightly with the themes of this essay -- CROSS-ROADS, CROSS-HAIRS, and Tom Brady's wife Gisele Bundchen's infatuation with CHE GUEVARA that has the U. S. counter-revolutionary bloggers upset in this second week of February, 2017.
In her book, Maureen O'Hara revealed that she had many conversations with Che Guevara and was fascinated by, among other things, his intelligence. Fellow rebels like Celia Sanchez said Che in campsites at night would entertain them by reciting, word for word, some of the world's most famous and longest poems. One night when he startled Maureen by recounting even arcane aspects of Ireland's history and its battles, he explained that his name was Che Guevara Lynch and that his grandmother was Irish like Maureen. But beyond her fascination about Che's ties to Ireland, Maureen O'Hara makes it quite plain in her book that she was both infatuated with and in love with the strikingly handsome, charismatic, and awesomely intelligent Che Guevara, the Argentine doctor whose fame related to the Cuban Revolution is second only to Fidel Castro's. On pages 209 and 210 of her book, Maureen O'Hara wrote these words:
"I had met Ernesto 'Che' Guevara very soon after arriving in Cuba. How could I not meet Che? He was one of the great heroes of Latin America. Che was often at the Capri Hotel. I would see him in the restaurant and he'd come to my table to say hello and eventually would sit down and join me. Che could talk about Ireland and all the guerrilla warfare that had taken place there. He knew every battle in Ireland and all of its history. Che knew more about Ireland than John Ford did. I couldn't believe and finally asked, 'Che, you know so much about Ireland and talk constantly about it. How do you know so much?' The Argentine mercenary and former doctor surprised me with his answer. He said, 'Well, my grandmother's name was Lynch and I learned everything I know about Ireland at her knee.' He was Che Guevara Lynch! That famous cap he wore was an Irish rebel's cap.
"I spent a great deal of time with Che Guevara while I was in Havana. I believe he was far less a mercenary than he was a freedom fighter. I think he was a product of his grandmother and her teachings. I look back on how young and idealistic Che was when I made that picture. It's hard to believe he had already helped to topple a dictator and liberate a nation. Today he is a symbol for freedom fighters wherever they are in the world and I think he is a good one. When word came of his capture and execution, I was deeply saddened. I have no doubts he had no regrets as he faced his assassin and spoke his final words: 'I know you've come to kill me. Shoot. You are only going to kill a man.'"
Maureen O'Hara had memorized Che's last words on this earth, and she personally knew much more about him. She was not just fascinated and infatuated with him. I believe she was deeply in love with him.
Believe me when I say I was fascinated by Maureen O'Hara's book, and not only because she's my all-time favorite actress. I honestly did not expect her to say a word about Cuba, the CIA, the Caribbean, Fidel Castro or Che Guevara. And most certainly, I was taken aback by her affection for Che, which she was totally unapologetic for even though by the time she wrote the book in 2004 she had lived for decades in the U. S. where the Cuban narrative since 1959 has largely been dictated by counter-revolutionary Che haters and supporters of Felix Rodriguez, Luis Posada Carriles, etc. But, you know, Tom Brady's unfathomable Super Bowl fame and his Supermodel wife's unabashed admiration of Che also caught my attention this week because of the scathing comments in the most high-polished anti-Cuban blogs.
This is super Tom Brady's famed wife, Gisele Bundchen, wearing her Che Guevara bikini. If you look closely both above and below her navel, you will see that the bikini is festooned with dozens of images of her idol Che Guevara, Cuba's Revolutionary icon. It now begs the question...what does Gisele Bundchen and a billion other Che admirers know that the Cuban narrative in the U. S. doesn't want us to know?
Or...consider my all-time favorite actress, Maureen O'Hara. She "spent a great deal of time with Che Guevara" and got to know him well...uh, intimately, some say. She probably knew him a lot better than Felix Rodriguez in Miami knows him to this day. So, who do you believe -- Maureen or Felix? {But please...don't ask me that question because, you see, my answer might not be politically correct or even...healthy.}
Maureen O'Hara
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