HAVANA – Former Vice President Carlos Lage and erstwhile Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque resigned all their posts in state institutions and the Cuban Communist Party, according to almost identical letters from them published Thursday by the official daily Granma.

The letters are addressed to the president of Cuba and second secretary of the Party, Gen. Raul Castro, who fired them on Monday, and in the missives both men acknowledge “mistakes” they committed and take “responsibility” for them, in very similar terms.

“Comrade Raul: I write to you to resign my posts as a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and its Politburo and my positions as deputy, member of the Council of State and vice president of the Council of State,” says the letter from Lage, dated on Tuesday, one day after his dismissal from the secretariat of the Council of Ministers was announced.

Perez Roque, meanwhile, resigned his position as a member of the Council of State, a deputy in the National Assembly and a member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee.

“I acknowledge the mistakes committed and take responsibility. I feel the analysis performed at the last meeting of the Politburo was fair and thorough,” Lage goes on to say.

“I fully acknowledge that I committed mistakes ... I take full responsibility for them,” Perez Roque said, referring to the same meeting of the Party Politburo, for which he does not specify the date but notes that he participated in it “as an invitee.”

Former Vice President Lage says that the Cuban leader can rest assured that his “new job position,” which he does not specify, will be “an opportunity to continue serving the Revolution,” adding that as he has been so far, he always will remain “faithful to the Party, to Fidel (Castro) and to you.”

Raul Castro fired the pair from their posts in a surprise move as part of a Cabinet reorganization that included the dismissal of eight ministers, the merging of four ministries into two and other changes, in a process to adjust elements of a Cuban government that had grown in size over the last decade or more. EFE