Fired Cuban leaders resign other government posts

Cuba's President Raul Castro (L) gestures next to Cuba's foreign minister Felipe Perez Roque at Havana's Jose Marti airport in this January 21, 2009 file photo. Castro shuffled the top levels of the Cuban government on Monday, ousting such some of the country's best known leaders, including foreign minister Felipe Perez Roque and Carlos Lage, a vice president who many considered an economic reformer.

HAVANA (Reuters) - Two former senior Cuban government ministers -- Felipe Perez Roque and Carlos Lage -- resigned from their other jobs in the government and the ruling Communist Party, bowing out of political life with letters saying they had committed errors.

Former Foreign Minister Perez Roque and former chief of cabinet Lage, fired from government jobs on Monday, had been seen as Cuba's top young leaders.

But they fell suddenly from grace and their letters, published on Thursday in the state-run media, completed that fall.

President Raul Castro cast them out of their cabinet jobs on Monday, then his brother and former President Fidel Castro publicly denounced them for having been seduced by the "honey of power" into "unworthy roles."

Cuba's "external enemy" had "filled itself with illusions" about them, Fidel Castro wrote without explanation in a Tuesday column.

Lage said in his letter, which was dated Tuesday, that he would also leave his more important post of vice president on the Council of State, Cuba's top policymaking body.

He also quit the Communist Party's central committee and political bureau, effectively removing himself from political life in the one-party state.

"I recognize the errors committed and I assume the responsibility. I consider that the analysis made in the past meeting with the Political Bureau (of the party) was just and profound," said Lage, 57.

Perez Roque, 43, said he would also quit the Council of State, the National Assembly and the party central committee.

"I fully recognize that I committed errors that were broadly analyzed in a meeting (with the Political Bureau). I assume my full responsibility for them," he said in the letter, also dated on Tuesday.

Neither letter specified what errors had been committed.

The two men were long-time proteges of Fidel Castro. Perez Roque was formerly Fidel Castro's personal secretary.

Lage, the architect of modest economic reforms in the early 1990s after the collapse of Cuba's former trade and aid partner the Soviet Union, was considered an economic reformer by many.

Perez Roque had recently spoken about the possibility of improving U.S.-Cuba relations with new U.S. President Barack Obama in office.

Fidel Castro, 82, resigned due to ill health last year after ruling Cuba for 49 years. Raul Castro, 77, was elected in February 2008 by the National Assembly to succeed him.

Raul Castro named eight new ministers and merged four ministries into two on Monday in what the government said was a move to make the government more efficient.

(Reporting by Jeff Franks; editing by Eric Beech and Frances Kerry)