Trump Joked at a Palm Beach Dinner Friday Night That the United States Could Take Cuba with a Single Aircraft Carrier Parked 100 Yards Offshore.

Friday night, May 1, Trump was the keynote at the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches’ 50th anniversary dinner at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach, honoring former Florida Rep. Dan Mica.

He pivoted off-script to Cuba, where Mica’s family is from, telling the room Cuba would be “taking over almost immediately” but the United States needed to finish Iran first. “I like to finish a job,” he said. Then came the carrier line. On the way back from Iran, Trump said, the US would station the USS Abraham Lincoln roughly 100 yards off the Cuban coast, and Cuba would surrender on sight. “Thank you very much, we give up,” Trump said, voicing the regime’s hypothetical capitulation himself.

The room laughed. The same evening, the executive order took effect.

The order broadens US sanctions across the regime’s senior officials, the entire security apparatus, and 4 named industrial sectors: energy, defense, financial services, and metals and mining. The meaningful piece is buried in the language. It is the first time secondary sanctions have been written this broadly against Cuba, putting any foreign bank with US dollar access at legal risk if it keeps doing business with Havana. Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla called the new measures “unilateral coercive measures” and said Cuba is open to dialogue but will resist.

The joke does not land the way previous Cuba threats from previous administrations have landed. In January, US forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a special operations raid built around the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group. Maduro fell. Cuba lost its Venezuelan oil subsidies the same week. The island is now in its worst economic crisis since the Special Period of the 1990s: rolling blackouts that stretch across entire days, severe shortages of fuel and medicine, roughly 15 percent of the population gone since 2021.

At the same dinner, Trump talked at length about the Venezuela operation. He called the January raid “an amazing amazing military maneuver.” He told the room the US has already sold 100 million barrels of Venezuelan oil to Texas refiners, with another 100 million coming next month, and that American oil companies are moving in. He described the post-Maduro relationship as “very good” and said the war on Venezuela had paid for itself 37 times over through oil revenue. He did not connect any of this to Cuba. He did not have to. The Venezuelan crude that used to keep Cuban hospitals lit is now being processed in Houston.

The USS Abraham Lincoln is currently deployed in the CENTCOM area, supporting the active US blockade of Iranian ports. There is no public confirmation of any carrier group repositioning toward the Caribbean. The carrier line was a joke. Whether it stays a joke is a different question.