Layers don’t necessarily produce 5 fertile eggs per week, in normal egg coops.
Maybe the Cubans forgot the whole rooster aspect of fertile eggs.
Also, they may have good chick hatcheries but high death rates.
Or lousy feed.
Or lousy water/sanitation.
There’s lots of reasons that add up to poor yields.
This is about meat birds which are Cornish Cross who have had breeding ability and instinct bred out of them. They are eating robots and nothing more. Let them get a few days too old and they get so heavy their legs will break. No rooster like that can possibly mount a hen and they have no such desire anyway.
Laying hens are hens. The egg industry doesn't use male chick because they don't lay eggs. They keep enough at the hatcheries to produce fertile eggs but that's a different business. The hatcheries supply egg farms with nothing but hens.
Chicken and eggs come from the store. That's all 99.9% of people know. That includes the author of this story evidently.
Now your backyard flock of a heritage breed can procreate but even then, most hens will not go broody and set on the eggs until they hatch. Broodiness is considered a bad thing as it reduces egg production so it's mostly been bred out by culling broody chicks. Most heritage breeds are considered dual purpose meat and eggs but it takes months to get to 4-6lbs as opposed to the Cornish Cross which takes 42 days. They won't have those huge breasts and will be tougher than CC birds.
Communist sure find a lot of ways to screw things up!