Greg,
I personally am not a fan out using busy cursors when you can use a busy indicator on the widget that is busy instead. To do this in many of my widget I ad this html code to the Widget.html
<div data-dojo-type="jimu/dijit/LoadingShelter" data-dojo-attach-point="shelter" data-dojo-props="hidden:true" style="overflow:hidden;"></div>
as the last tag inside the widgets main div tag. and in the Widget.js I can call simple methods like:
define([
....
'jimu/dijit/LoadingShelter',
....
function (
....
LoadingShelter,
....
){
this.shelter.show();
this.shelter.hide();