I have a fix for this problem,

    Gentlemen, in good old tty mode, outside of X windows,
    I have in .bashrc
    if test $DISPLAY$EMACS; then :; else
        #VGA-softcursor.txt says to get red non-blinking block prompt
        echo -e '\033[?17;0;64c'
    fi

One must create an edited terminfo entry, so run the attached
Makefile from your ~/.terminfo directory,