Yes, there is a way: you look it up in a dictionary.
What do you mean by long and short vowel, anyway? The stuff they teach schoolchildren? If so, then you really just use the “normal” “rules” for English vowels. Here are some possible sounds for u in Latin-derived words in English:
/juː/as in the stressed syllables cuticle, Europe, funeral, humor, purify, and urine, or in the unstressed syllable of accurate and mercury./uː/as in the stressed syllables of juniper, juror, Rubicon, and troubadour.
/ʌ/as in the stressed syllables of abundant, annul, culture, custom, number, jugular, pumice, and sulfur./ɝ/,[ʌɹ]as in the stressed syllables of murmur, occur, recursive, urban, urgent, and Ursa Major.
/ɚ/,[əɹ]as in the unstressed syllables of Excalibur, culture, murmur, lemur, and sulphur./ə/as in the unstressed syllables of album, asylum, bacterium, circus, focus, illustrate, proconsul, and suburbia.
There are many other possibilities besides. As you see, there really is nothing special about words that come from Latin in the list above.
Yes, a native speaker will be able to come up with something that makes sense even on a new word they haven’t seen before.
If you are talking not about English words, but rather about open and closed u in the traditional English pronunciation of Latin words, then that is perhaps something else again.
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