Is cron command supposed to work like this?
You don't need to call cron directly. Any commands you want to run need to be added to the crontab of the user they should run as. You can edit your crontab by running

crontab -e


or, if you are an admin user and want to edit the crontab of another user,

crontab -u USERNAME -e


PS: Run man 5 crontab for details about the format of the file, what kind of special commands you can use, and some samples. 5 * * * * /path/to/script seems to be ok though.