Comment by tbrake
Changing "cube" to "kube" would just look like it's pronounced "koob" (e.g. rube, tube, lube), so we swap a minor spelling aggravation for a minor pronunciation edge case. unless you want to go full kyube but we're not putting that on the table.
Why would it? "u" generally doesn't follow this pattern in English after "k" any more so than it does after "c".
That aside, what you describe is a distinction between yod-dropping and lack thereof, and whether and where it happens is highly dialect dependent.