"The speed of RS232 communications is expressed in Baud."

To be pedantic (just this once), that is not an entirely accurate use of the term "Baud."

Strictly, the Baud is a measure of information transfer rate; when people speak of RS232 speed, they're actually referring to the signalling bit rate.
Michael Karas described the situation quite nicely:
http://www.8052.com/forum/read.phtml?id=51506

Thus, you see that the signalling bit rate includes all the overheads (framing, error-checking, etc): therefore the true Baud rate - in its strict information transfer sense - is always going to be less than the signalling bit rate of the communication medium!

The RS232 spec does not use the Term "Baud" - it sticks to the literally accurate "bits per second."