Robert Lee Baldock (April 30, 1937 – October 22, 2022) was one of the few U.S. citizens to participate in the Cuban Revolution as a combatant in Fidel Castro's unit based in the Sierra Maestra in 1958.
He went on to work at the New York Herald Tribune as a copyboy; there he had privileged access to ticker-tape coverage of the Cuban insurrectionary movement as well as to maps and press passes.
Baldock also claimed he and his friend were then moved covertly out of the country through an underground network consisting primarily of small Catholic churches.
[11] ;[12] He was given work as a proofreader and copywriter by Olympia Press, controversial publisher of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and Nabokov's Lolita.
For several months he worked (in the absence of owner George Whitman) in the bookstore Le Mistral, later renamed Shakespeare and Company after the famous bookshop founded by Sylvia Beach.
Gallery in Berkeley, 1980;[15][16] He also designed a number of book covers for W.W. Norton & Company, including a series for their reissue of works by Rainer Maria Rilke in the 1990s.
[18][19] As president of the corporation he undertook (with the participation of partner Pretari and staffer Victoria Shoemaker) a popular series of in-store readings, showcasing many authors of international repute, including Carlos Fuentes, Czeslaw Milosz, Edna O'Brien, Isabel Allende, Toni Morrison, Eduardo Galeano, Alice Walker, Gore Vidal, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, Alice Waters, Tom Wolfe, Barry Lopez, Nancy Morejón, and others.
Not long after separating from Jeanne Forrest Baldock in 1985, he met his future wife, writer and translator Kathleen Weaver; they were married July 13, 1989.
[23] Over the following decades he has produced well over three hundred public events with writers and occasionally musicians, fundraisers for KPFA and the parent Pacifica network, often in conjunction with other non-profit organizations.