We prove that for any prime power $q\notin \{3,4,5\}$ , the cubic extension $\mathbb {F}_{q^{3}}$ of the finite field $\mathbb {F}_{q}$ contains a primitive element $\xi $ such that $\xi +\xi ^{-1}$ is also primitive, and $\operatorname {\mathrm {Tr}}_{\mathbb {F}_{q^{3}}/\mathbb {F}_{q}}(\xi )=a$ for any prescribed $a\in \mathbb {F}_{q}$ . This completes the proof of a conjecture of Gupta et al. [‘Primitive element pairs with one prescribed trace over a finite field’, Finite Fields Appl. 54 (2018), 1–14] concerning the analogous problem over an extension of arbitrary degree $n\ge 3$ .