The party in Cuba which was struggling against her oppression decided that since they dared not give expression of their views in the local press, they would establish organs outside their distressed country. Two papers were accordingly issued, one at Paris, called _El Correo de Ultramar_, and one at Madrid called _El Observador_. These were both edited by able Cubans who were in exile. Later, in 1848, _La Verdad_, a paper devoted to Cuban interests, was started in New York and the copies given free distribution. Tacon, like other despots, sought to cover his misdeeds by public works, with which he tried to placate those possible insurgents whom he had not imprisoned, and to deceive the Spanish government; for cruel and arbitrary as had been the Spanish attitude toward her colonies, it is doubtful whether the Spanish Cortes, had all the facts been known, would have countenanced some of the brutalities of which Tacon was guilty. There is a curious irony, a sort of paradox, about one of the improvements which Tacon made on the island. As we have seen, the prisons had never before been so full, and there had never before been such a demand for places to incarcerate political offenders. Tacon consequently caused a prison to be built, which has ever since been pointed to as a palliation of some of his misdeeds. It is situated near the gate of La Punta, and not far distant from the sea coast. It is well ventilated and airy, and open to the sea breezes. One point urged in its favor was that "its unfortunate inmates were protected from those pestilential fevers rising from crowded and ill-ventilated rooms." In other words, they were torn from squalor to well ventilated imprisonment. This would have been all very nice, were it not for the fact that numbers of the prisoners were from the best homes on the island, and had no need of a comfortable boarding house by the sea, watched over by an inhuman jailor. The prison had a capacity of five thousand prisoners, and very shortly after its erection it sheltered one thousand. It was built by the labor of convicts, and poor, unhappy political prisoners, and partly with funds which Tacon extracted from some of the officers who served under his predecessors, claiming that such funds had been by them unlawfully appropriated to their own use.