BY JUAN O. TAMAYO

 Cuban authorities freed the third top dissident in 10 days Tuesday, lawyer Rene
 Gomez Manzano, 56, jailed 1,043 days on sedition charges that sparked
 international condemnation of Havana's human rights record.

 The release left only one of the four best-known dissidents on the island behind
 bars -- Vladimiro Roca, a former air force combat pilot who is the son of the late
 Blas Roca, a longtime member of the Cuban Communist Party's politburo.

 Gomez Manzano was released at 3 p.m. and immediately went to a reunion with
 the two other leading dissidents freed during the past 10 days -- Felix Bonne, 60,
 an engineering professor, and economist Marta Beatriz Roque, 55.

 ``He is healthy and anxious to join Marta and Felix to resume their work, said
 Gomez Manzano's brother, Jorge, in a telephone conversation from Havana.

 The three freed dissidents and Roca are leaders of the Internal Dissidence
 Working Group, which issued a harsh 1997 attack on the Cuban Communist
 Party's monopoly on power titled ``The Motherland Belongs to All.''

 They were arrested July 16, 1997, and were convicted of incitement to sedition
 March 21, 1999, in a one-day trial closed to foreign diplomats and journalists.

 The case sparked outcries from foreign governments and the Vatican, and played
 a key role in the U.N. Human Rights Commission's votes to condemn Cuba
 during its last two annual sessions in Geneva.

 Cuban human rights activist Elizardo Sanchez said the release of the three
 dissident leaders was ``very good news, but noted that about 350 political
 prisoners remain in President Fidel Castro's prisons.

 He is especially worried about Roca, who has been held in solitary confinement
 since his arrest. ``The prison conditions have been very harsh for him, Sanchez
 said in a telephone interview from Havana.

 Roca's status as the son of a Communist Party founder and as a former combat
 pilot makes him the most famous Cuban to break with Castro's 41-year-old
 revolution and join the dissident movement, although many top government
 officials have defected and left the country.

 Gomez Manzano and Bonne were sentenced to four years in prison, Roque to 3
 1/2 years and Roca to five as the mastermind behind the document that angered
 the government. The three freed were granted ``conditional freedom, the Cuban
 equivalent of early release for good conduct.