Greetings again,

My install only shows four choices in /etc/X11/cursors/.
These are core.theme, handhelds.theme, redglass.theme and whiteglass.theme. Could by my choices are so few because
(1) mine is a LiveUSB made from the LiveCD, and
(2) I use a no3d default to disable Compiz.

If I look at /etc/alternatives, I see my default cursor is set to core.theme.
I can change it to whiteglass.theme as follows:

cd /etc/alternatives
sudo su
rm x-cursor-theme
ln -s /etc/X11/cursors/whiteglass.theme x-cursor-theme

You may see some change right-away here, depending on what you have on your desktop, but to get the full effect, I had to do a full re-boot.

To change back to core.theme, I would just do this:

cd /etc/alternatives
sudo su
rm x-cursor-theme
ln -s /etc/X11/cursors/core.theme x-cursor-theme

and re-boot, of course.